


Uniforming (Made To Seem)

by Hannah



Category: House M.D.
Genre: Other
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-07
Updated: 2010-02-07
Packaged: 2017-10-07 02:47:54
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 35,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/60610
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Hannah/pseuds/Hannah
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Playing the boy, and the complications therein.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Uniforming (Made To Seem)

**Author's Note:**

> Thanks to many people who listened to me ramble, especially Ayalesca and Perspi for beta-reading.

 

She still couldn’t recognize the face in the mirror. She knew it was hers – when she smiled, the face smiled, and when she winked, it winked back at her – but it was still so new, and so fresh, it didn’t feel like it belonged to her yet. No matter how long she looked at it, or how much she touched it, it didn’t feel like it ought to.

 

Turning her head to get a good look at her chin and jaw, she ran her thumb down over her lips before pulling it away. She shook her head, sighed, and then reached for the elastics. One at the base of the queue, the other around her fingers while she pleated her hair until she needed it to tie off the end. Then the scissor’s blades went snicker-snack, and she shook her head, feeling that much lighter.

 

The face in the mirror looked even less like she thought it should, but that helped, like having less to recognize made her see who she was now even more.

 

-

 

There were two weeks left out of the eight she’d gotten for emergency medical leave, and first things first. She’d grabbed plenty of scrubs from the hospital, one-size-fits-all-men’s, so she wouldn’t be reduced to a bed sheet toga before heading out to get some stuff that actually fit so she’d be able to head into work without embarrassing herself. After almost five weeks of bed-ridden nausea and pain, being able to walk into a store – even if she was decked out head to toe in pink, down to the slippers – was more satisfying than it had any right to be. It was easy enough to find what she was looking for, and after she went home and put on something decent she went right back out to a barber’s shop for a real haircut.

 

There was grocery shopping to do, and catching up with the mail and the bills, getting new photos for her passport and driver’s license, getting new shoes, finally getting her place cleaned up, scheduling physiotherapy appointments, visiting the dentist, going clothes shopping again to get stuff for work, going grocery shopping again, getting new reading glasses, catching up on sleep, finally getting out to exercise, getting used to shaving in the morning, bagging up everything that didn’t fit anymore and sending all her jewelry off to her sister. Clearing her closets and medicine cabinet and finding everything that wouldn’t fit or she wouldn’t use anymore took most of one day, and phone tag with the HR department took most of another.

 

Some things she knew wouldn’t be fixed or done right away. Her hair was the same color and she still needed corrective lenses, but most of her scars and freckles had disappeared while she’d been too far gone to notice, and there was no way she ready to pee standing up. Gaining back all the weight she lost would take time – she’d look ghastly for a while, and probably single-handedly triple the New Jersey demand for red meat until she was back at a healthy weight for her height. A five-five woman at a hundred-forty pounds was fine, but most of that had melted away when she’d grown five inches in three weeks.

 

Her hands didn’t hurt anymore, but she still had to watch them whenever she reached for something to pick it up. Nothing fit or felt the way it ought to: she felt like she was drunk or hungover all the time, depending on how much she ached in the morning.

 

Finally walking back into work, hearing the quiet shunt of the doors and the regular bustle of the hospital, was more of a relief than she’d thought. No way was she up to the locker room just yet; that she’d tackle next week. She took a deep breath, straightened her tie, and made her way over to the elevator, somehow glad nobody was glancing at her to check her out – if she couldn’t recognize herself, no way they could. That was…kind of nice, actually. If she screwed up now, there was a good chance nobody would think it was her. She had the elevator all to herself, thankfully, and she held her head high as she stepped off, glancing at House in his office before pushing the door open. The conference room was almost empty-handed, the way it usually was during downtime. “Morning, Foreman.” He glanced up from the paper, did a double-take, then looked at her. She just smiled and waved.

 

He smiled back at her. “Good to see you back.”

 

“Thanks.” She put her briefcase down on the table before heading over to pour herself a cuppa. Not looking up from ripping open the packet or pouring the water, “So did I miss anything?”

 

“Well, House almost got shot.”

 

“Almost? How’d that happen?”

 

“Someone was angry over finding out his wife cheated on him –”

 

“Now there’s a big surprise.” It took two tries to grab the milk; she flexed her hands and hoped Foreman hadn’t noticed.

 

“So he thought revenge on the man who uncovered that would settle his life. Shultze managed to grab him in the hallway. House framed the clippings, they’re over his desk.” She glanced through the wall – so they were. “Wehmeyer is still waiting on her patent application, and Marshall had her baby so DeFries is filling in for her for the next couple of months.”

 

“Any interesting cases?”

 

“Not since you left.”

 

She put the mug on the table before pulling out the chair to sit. “And Chase?” His fellowship was about to end right when she’d started shifting – she’d tried calling him to apologize for not being able to see him but ended up leaving a message where her voice kept breaking.

 

“Yeah, about Chase, I’m sorry you had to miss the party.”

 

“There was a party?”

 

“With balloons and cake and everything.” He didn’t crack a smile or move a muscle. “House made me save you a piece.”

 

They stared for a moment before Cameron broke into a grin. “You almost had me there. Has he hired anyone new yet?”

 

“I haven’t seen anyone interview. You’re sure you’re okay to be back and working?”

 

“Yeah.”

 

“You seem a bit –”

 

“I’m fine. I’m happy to be working again.”

 

He raised an eyebrow, and took a careful sip of his tea. She pulled out her new glasses and the last issue of _Journal of Immunology_ and started to read.

 

-

 

It took the rest of the week to finish all the HR paperwork, get her new locker, and for House’s new fellow to show up. She’d come in early and was catching up on her reading when a curly-haired woman walked in. She glanced around the room, not really looking at Cameron while she dropped her bag on the table and went over for some tea. Cameron waited, but by the time the water was boiling she still hadn’t gotten any eye contact.

 

“Hello.”

 

“Oh, hello,” she tossed over her shoulder while she tipped the kettle. Cameron waited, but that was all she got.

 

“Are you new here?” She asked when the new woman sat down.

 

“Yeah, starting today.”

 

“And you’re House’s new fellow?”

 

“This is the Diagnostics department.” Reaching into her bag, she pulled out a journal of her own and began to read.

 

Cameron waited and didn’t get anything else. She wasn’t happy with how the conversation was going, but she knew how men were supposed to act from watching them, so she smiled at the top of the woman’s head and went back to her own article. Foreman showed up almost twenty minutes later and didn’t seem to suffer any internal awkwardness; all he did was greet the new woman and introduce himself – why hadn’t she remembered to do that? Now it was too late in the conversation for her to do it without being weird. She’d have to keep waiting while her stomach kept knotting up.

 

House didn’t show up until almost twenty to eleven, grinning over what Cameron assumed was his regular perverted joy over any woman in a tight top. Miller started to get up. “Doctor House, it’s –”

 

“Thank you.” She stopped. “For ensuring perfect continuity of art in the lobby.” He tossed a smirk at Cameron while the new fellow stayed in the half-standing position, looking around the table before focusing on the woman. “Foreman, Cameron, meet Michelle Miller. Classically trained hepatologist, top of her class, donates blood religiously every eight weeks, and divorced from her high school sweetheart as of three months ago. Now, remember, play nice with the new kid.” He fished out his bottle and tossed back a pill before turning around and heading back to his own office.

 

Miller watched him go before sinking back down. “Is he always like that?”

 

Cameron smiled, remembering her adjustment period. “You get used to it.”

 

With the most perplexed expression, Miller nodded slowly before going back to her reading. Cameron waited, and then turned away as well. It was like that for rest of the week: no matter what Cameron did to try to be friendly there was that same perplexity and coldness. The worst part was that through it all there wasn’t any indication she was doing anything wrong, insulting, or offensive, just nothing Miller thought of as polite or acceptable or worth her attention. Even bringing in muffins hadn’t helped.

 

Cameron waited for to Foreman leave on Friday before staring right at Miller and asking point-blank, “What am I doing wrong?”

 

“I’m sorry?”

 

“You’ve been here for a week and the most you’ve said to me is ‘no thank you.’ Is there something I’m doing wrong that’s bothering you?”

 

She huffed, putting her journal down. “Look, I don’t know why you need me to like you –”

 

“I’m not trying to get you to like me.”

 

“I don’t need to like you and you don’t need to like me. I know you don’t like me being here in your little boy’s club but –”

 

That got a double-take. “Wait, wait. ‘Boy’s club’?”

 

“Are they calling it something new now?”

 

“It isn’t…I mean, I’m not a boy.”

 

That got one from Miller. “I’m sorry?”

 

“I’m not a boy. I didn’t grow up as one.” Her cheeks were burning, but she said it anyway. “I shifted over the summer.”

 

“You –” She slowly nodded. “Oh. Oh, that makes sense now.”

 

“What makes sense?”

 

“How weird you were acting.” Miller giggled. “I mean, you were acting like a woman.”

 

“…I am a woman.”

 

She was still smiling, but now it was more condescending, more knowing. “Cameron, you don’t need to keep clinging. It’s okay.”

 

She didn’t need this. Grabbing her briefcase, “Allison.”

 

“Sorry?”

 

Not looking at Miller while she ran out, “My name’s Allison.”

 

-

 

The next Friday, when Wilson poked his head in the door from the hallway only Miller looked surprised. “Cameron, can I borrow you for a minute?”

 

He’d asked for weirder things and she wanted to get out of here. “Sure.” Walking alongside in the hallway, there was that weird sense of displacement again – she was almost his height now. “Do you need me for anything?”

 

“No, I just wanted to talk to you in private.” He closed his office’s door behind them and sat down on one of the chairs opposite the sofa, gesturing for her to take it. When she did, he leaned in and asked, “So how are you holding up?”

 

She leaned back against the cushions, composing her face and throwing her hands over the back before remembering the right behavior and crossing them in her lap. “Not too badly, actually. House is the same, which is pretty helpful – just because I’m using the men’s room now isn’t a good reason to treat me differently.”

 

“Well, that’s House for you.”

 

That got her to smile for real. “He still wants me to cover his clinic hours. And I am, and they’re fine.” He stayed leaning in, face open. She went on, “It’s a little hard, though. I know a lot of people don’t expect a male doctor.”

 

“I know a couple of people who told me they got into medicine just so they wouldn’t have to deal with men.”

 

“Bet you were a surprise, then.”

 

“My goodness, what is that penis doing in here? This is a vagina-only area!” She laughed, and he went on smiling, “I used to get asked if I was going to be a nurse. The more socially acceptable branch of the profession.”

 

“And that’s still mostly women.”

 

“The Sixties couldn’t change everything.” He stopped, set his mouth, glanced to the side then back at Cameron. “You know if you need anyone to talk to about this, or if you need any advice –”

 

“Thank you. I – thank you. If I do, and I need to ask you something, I will.”

 

“There are –” he didn’t look like he knew the right words for what he wanted, “there are a couple of people – I don’t know them all that well, but if you want to talk to someone who’s on the other side of it, I can put you in touch.”

 

She looked away herself, feeling blood rush to her cheeks without knowing why. “I can’t keep saying thank you.”

 

“You’re welcome.”

 

-

“In the suggested interest of easing everyone into a new work environment – not that I give a crap, but my best buddy seems to – have a freebie.” House handed the file off to Miller, who begain reading. “Twenty-six-year-old female, paralyzed from the neck down with no evidence of a spinal injury. You’ve got about ninety-six hours before anything goes really wrong with her, so if you figure it out before I need to step in, kudos for everyone.”

 

Miller didn’t look up from the screen. “The paralysis started in her yoga class yesterday.”

 

“Any symptoms or problems before then?” Cameron asked.

 

“Nothing related to this. No symptoms before yesterday means nothing pathological.”

 

“Could be transverse myelitis, swelling in the disk choking off nerve function,” Foreman suggested.

“The MRI's negative for that.”

 

Cameron shook her head. “We don’t know where the problem’s coming from. We should do an EMG to see if it’s her spine.”

 

“And if it’s not?” Miller glanced at Cameron like she didn’t take her seriously. It was a look she’d gotten a lot recently, even after she’d told her.

 

She took a deep breath to calm down. “Then we see what comes next.”

 

-

 

It turned out to be a false alarm for a plural effusion. A clean echiocardiogram didn’t help much – “No structural abnormalities.”

 

“Could be an infectious process,” Foreman suggested as he sat down to join Cameron at the table. “TB?”

 

Cameron shrugged. “Vasculitis would also explain the effusion.”

 

“Not the paralysis,” Miller shook her head. “That’s no good.”

 

“She moved. Therefore, she could move. She wasn’t paralyzed.” She shook her head.

 

Miller tapped the pen on the whiteboard. “So we’ve got sixty-seven hours before we have to admit to House we couldn’t manage. I don’t know about you two, but I’m not ready for that on my first day. So, does anyone –”

 

“We’re asking the wrong questions.” Miller and Foreman turned to look at Cameron. “This isn’t what House would do. He’d ask what’s missing before trying to figure out something else.”

 

“So what are we missing?” Miller crossed her arms over her chest. “What should we be looking for?”

 

“I don’t know. That’s the point. We should go talk to her.”

 

“Since when does House talk to his patients?” Foreman asked.

 

“Since every time he needs to figure out what they’re not telling him.”

 

Once they got to Caren’s bedside – House claiming he was only tagging along for the ride – they started to go through her file, cross-checking everything they could, trying to find what they’d missed. Nothing came up until Cameron sighed and asked, “Any major lifestyle changes recently?”

 

“Of course you’re the one to ask that,” House smirked. Everyone turned to look at him, but he waved them off. “Nothing. Go on. Tell them what they need to know.”

 

Caren swallowed and looked at Cameron. “I, um…I moved three months ago, and –”

 

“If it was something from your new home it’d show up already. What else?”

 

“I’m on this new diet now, to lose weight.”

 

“What sort of diet?” Miller leaned in.

 

“Ketosis. High protein, low carb, low starch.”

 

Cameron glanced at House, who was still smiling, and then thought about the contents of her own kitchen, the last shopping trip – and jerked her head to the side when she remembered how much she’d boggled over the new daily guidelines from her nutritionist. “Does this diet have any room for plants?”

 

-

 

“Scurvy.” Miller managed to flop into one of the glass-and-metal chairs and repeated, “scurvy.”

 

“Hey, last year we had the bubonic plague,” Foreman pointed out.

 

“So what’s next? Smallpox?”

 

“Not unless we get a call from the CIA,” he said. Cameron just kept her mouth shut.

 

-

 

If she thought of meeting the urologist like meeting a gynecologist, it was easier. She needed her stuff checked out no matter what stuff it was, and this was the last establishing-everything-as-okay check-up of the year – after this, they didn’t need to be as frequent, which was nice. But speculums could at least get warmed up first.

 

“Are you getting regular erections?” At least this Mathias had waited until she had gotten her pants on.

 

“I wouldn’t say they’re regular.” Not like she was getting them every quarter moon, not like that, “but I get them pretty often.”

 

“Good. It’d be something to worry about if you weren’t, you know.”

 

“I know.” She didn’t mention that sometimes they wouldn’t go away after she peed, or that she’d sometimes wake up with one when she didn’t need to use the bathroom. When that happened and she didn’t want to take a shower, she’d grab an ice pack from the freezer, press it to her groin, and watch TV and wait until everything finally went limp.

 

Knowing everything was working the way it was supposed to didn’t make her feel any less disgusting when she had to change the sheets three times a week because she hadn’t mastered not wetting the bed with out-of-control dreams she couldn’t remember. Those days, she took blistering-hot showers, scrubbing herself as much and as hard as she could – she couldn’t say why she needed to, except that it helped her feel a little better when she came out of one shaking a little bit from all the heat.

 

-

 

On some level it was comforting to know that labwork and caffeine still had the same results, which, when combined, ended in a sprint to the bathroom. Ah, good, there was a stall open – unzip, pull down, turn around, and sit. Bladder control was the same no matter what orifice the urine was leaving from, thankfully, but damn if it didn’t feel weird as all-get-out.

 

She knew by now to wipe the tip off, holding it gingerly in one hand and looking away while she swiped the toilet paper over it, and didn’t look down until she’d pulled up her underwear. As long as she had clothes on it was okay. Not great, but okay enough she didn’t feel nauseated. She adjusted everything, made sure she hadn’t forgotten her fly, flushed and went out to wash her hands and get back to the bloodwork.

 

She was washing her hands when the door opened. Cameron looked up and froze when she meet the eyes of Stamets from pathology, hers open with her mouth hanging down too, a perfect cartoon representation of surprise.

 

Cameron didn’t stop to turn off the water or dry her hands to get out of the wrong-gendered bathroom as soon as she could, and didn’t stop going until she got back to the lab and one of its many small dark corners. Fuck. People had seen her leave, they must have seen her going in, shit shit shit. This was embarrassing, this was wrong, this was – well, House would get his hands on the gossip and she’d never hear the end of it, and everyone would know she couldn’t keep track of which bathroom she was supposed to use now, and they’d look at her and know and she couldn’t be anonymous in her new face anymore. Fuck. There were at least a billion things to adjust to, a billion things she had to do to get back up to a reasonable level of health, a billion things she had to pay attention to, and when she thought she had them all down a full bladder tripped her up and put her back right at the beginning.

 

Hiding in the lab was one move away from hiding in a locked supply closet. At least nobody expected her for another hour so she could budget twenty minutes for a good, healthy spat of quiet raging. When she was done, calmed down and face washed in the lab’s sink, at least she had proof positive for von Willebrand’s disease, and they could work on treating their patient from there.

 

She hadn’t really calmed down, though, and was still carrying around the anger when she got back home that night – morning, really, which wasn’t helping. It was too late and too early to do a dumbbell workout and she wasn’t in the mood to pace her bedroom anymore so she rummaged through her laundry basket until she found what she’d tossed aside yesterday, the sweatpants, t-shirt, and sweatshirt. No need for a sports bra, just her new barely-broken-in sneakers, and she’d locked the door and was on her way running. The streetlamps were out, yellow-white light making the sidewalks and houses look like old photographs; she sped past them, looking down at her feet slamming the pavement then looking up again.

 

Her physical therapist liked to explain that exercise and movement was the best way to get to know her new body, to listen to it while she made it work and move to see what it would tell her about what it could do. And that worked well enough when she wanted to learn, but right now all she wanted was to move and get some of the anger out of her before it settled back into depression. Right now she didn’t want to listen to what wasn’t working.

 

But she didn’t need a sports bra and that wasn’t right, she needed tight underwear instead and that was wrong. Her legs were too long and her lungs felt too big and she didn’t feel solid enough, not solid anymore – running shouldn’t be this easy, she shouldn’t be going this fast. She turned a corner and tried to go faster and found out she could and that was wrong too. She hated this, hated it, but had to live with it and inside of it and didn’t have a way out.

 

By the time she got back to her apartment, an hour later, her clothes were sticking to her in all the wrong places and ways, and she was too tired to shower, just pulling on fresh pajamas and falling into bed. She could do the laundry on Saturday.

 

Eventually, she opened up to Cuddy about it. If she hadn’t worked for House, she knew she wouldn’t be getting this sort of attention, but on some level she couldn’t bring herself to mind. And Cuddy had asked, anyway, almost like Wilson, drawing Cameron into her office to keep her privacy. It didn’t feel all that bad, talking and chatting over personal issues like this – it almost felt like old times. About five months ago, give or take a week.

 

After they’d talked about Foreman and Miller, Cameron found herself describing how she’d fled from the bathroom. Cuddy just smiled. “We’ve all made that mistake.”

 

“When you’re eight, not when you’re twenty-nine. It’s embarrassing because I should know enough to check which bathroom, and I shouldn’t have to do that. I should know which one to use by now.”

 

“If you think you need more time off work –”

 

“No, I just…it’s tiring to be on guard all the time, and I can’t really relax. Once I get better at it, I should be fine.”

 

Cuddy didn’t say anything and leaned back in her chair. “In my experience people don’t always ask for what they need. If there’s anything you want, please, ask someone about it. See what they can do. It won’t help to try to do this all on your own.”

 

“I’m not –”

 

She held up her hand. “If you want me to get angry at you and yell at you for making a stupid mistake, I can do that. You made a stupid mistake over something you don’t have a lot of practice doing. Does that help?”

 

“A little.” She shrugged, and let herself go on. “I know I shouldn’t be so mad at myself, but it’s a lot easier than getting depressed.”

 

That just got Cuddy to sigh. “Blame the hormones for that one.”

 

-

 

The next few days were tricky – either only Stamets had seen her, or nobody was polite enough to mention it. Big busy hospitals had plenty of distractions, more than enough to keep people from spending time noticing who went into which bathroom if they weren’t under personal supervision. Cameron still took it as a good lesson, making sure to be more careful, even though she still got nauseated when she looked at a urinal, always opting for a stall and waiting for one if she had to. No need to give House more fodder; at least he’d stopped hiding nude spreads in her papers when she left the room for more than two minutes.

 

One morning, after she’d started on some tea and another article and Miller was in the clinic, she noticed that Foreman was watching her again. But he was looking at her differently this time.

 

“Is something wrong?”

 

He let out a breath very slowly, narrowing his eyes, and said, “You’re not drinking right.” He picked up his own mug to demonstrate. “This is how you hold it. See, a guy’s supposed to tip what he’s holding or his hand, not his head.” Turning to the side to mime drinking, she saw what he meant, and when he was done she repeated the movement back to him. “Yeah, like that.”

 

“What else should I be doing? Do I need to shower more?”

 

“No, but most men do wear some sort of perfume.”

 

“I use deodorant.”

 

“Not exactly the same thing. Find a department store with a decent counter and ask them to get you something good. Also, men make more eye contact with each other, but not with women. Just something to keep in mind.”

 

“Oh.” She’d wondered about that but hadn’t been able to put it so neatly. One more thing she had to pay attention to in otherwise mindless conversations. “Is this secret guy-code stuff that you don’t want Miller to hear?”

 

“No, it’s stuff you usually pick up by middle school. Look, I’m only doing this because you need the help. It’s getting a little embarrassing to watch you keep screwing up.”

 

“So you’re just helping on behalf of the gender.”

 

“Pretty much.”

 

“Then on behalf of the gender, I apologize for the embarrassment.”

 

“And I accept your apology.”

 

She spent most of her shower that night trying to parse out Foreman’s motivations. Pure altruism wasn’t an option, and neither was concerned friendship – it’s possible she just annoyed him by getting everything wrong all the time, like when she kept making eye contact with clinic patients who were always a bit more nervous, but she’d put that down to her having a penis now. She knew she’d use what he told her every day – that would have make a case for the altruism except for the way he’d ended up telling her what she was doing wrong.

 

He told her, just like everyone told her, that it’d get easier, but it wasn’t, and she knew it wouldn’t. Keeping track of everything she had to do and what she wasn’t supposed to do and how to hold herself in check was getting harder the more she learned. Going to the perfume counter was easy enough, and for a while she’d liked it, chatting with the salesman about fragrances and scents and skins like she’d learned from her mother – some things were the same, and some things weren’t. When he brought out something she’d liked, she’d felt comfortable enough to spray the inside of her wrist and sniffed that, and suddenly he looked at her like she’d just pulled a piece of gum out of her mouth and dropped it on his counter. Realizing she couldn’t apologize for not knowing to sniff the back of her hand and explain why, she smiled and tried to go on with the conversation, and he was enough of a professional to move on so he could make the sale.

 

It’d be a lot simpler if everyone had that sort of clear motivation. Working with House had taught her well enough to know that wouldn’t ever be the case, even in department stores where people were paid on commission.

 

-

 

Work kept on going – accidental incest, random small-celled lung cancer, her boss kidnapping a formerly vegetative state patient for a long-distance diagnostic session. Nothing unusual for her line of work, even the week of harassment by an irate police officer that started on Tuesday and Cuddy defused by Friday that left Miller more frazzled than anything else she’d seen yet.

 

“How often does that sort of thing happen?” She had her chin in her hand, elbow on the table, staring out at nothing at all. Cameron made a mental note to get a more detailed personal history when she could.

 

“House ticking off clinic patients or getting into legal trouble? Pretty much every time we get a new case or he needs a refill.” Foreman handed Miller a fresh mug of tea, completely at ease with her presence in the room. Some things were easier to adjust to than others. Staying in a situation where he was working with plenty of men had to be pretty nice for him after med school – as much fun as it would’ve been to be able to date anyone he wanted and have the pick of the room, she knew guys were supposed to like hanging around other guys. Going back to something a little more reflective of everyday life had to be nice for him.

 

These days, for her, a day she didn’t end up crying at home or hiding in the bathroom because she still didn’t know how to say hello to clinic patients or ask a salesman for some help or had to kill her erection with a cold shower was a good one.

 

-

 

She still called her parents and sister regularly – not every day but a couple of times a week if she could, and only turned off the video feed some of the time instead of every time. Some days it was easier to talk if she didn’t have to look at their faces.

 

“I just wish you could come home for Thanksgiving.” Her mother usually left her feeds running when she was in the same room with the justification it was just in case she got a call; she also wouldn’t stop what she was doing in case she ended up getting one. From this angle, all Cameron could see was the door to the pantry, but she could hear the dishes in the sink if she turned the volume up.

 

“You know I’d like to come home too.” It’d be all right if she left the room, not like her mother would know; still, some obligation of filial piety and the warm blankets kept her in the chair. She still didn’t have a lot of fat back yet, and with the PT and stress-running a lot of the calories went to muscle. Winter was coming early and she’d need a decent pair of gloves, a hat, a scarf – things that hadn’t been so much of a priority back in summer. She pulled the blankets a bit tighter.

 

Her mother went on, “Amanda’s already reserved her family a coach.”

 

“She always liked traveling fancy.”

 

“They put in a new route a few months ago. It should cut the travel ah!” Whatever she was going to say got cut off by glass falling onto the kitchen tile. The sound always made Cameron’s hair stand on end.

 

“Mom? Are you okay?”

 

Somehow it was enough to get her mother to come to the phone, to sit down in front of it and reach over to adjust the screen before running a hand over her head; her hair was showing a the roots and her nails were cut down to the quick. “I’m fine, I just dropped a wineglass. I know, I shouldn’t do the dishes when I’m making a phone call. Give me a moment to get the broom.”

 

“Oh, okay. I mean, it’s okay – I should be going anyway.”

 

“I only need a moment.”

 

“No, mom, it’s fine. You need to clean up the mess. I’ll call you tomorrow, okay?”

 

She looked like she wanted to say something negative about that, but she pursed her lips for a moment and then said, “Okay. We’ll talk later, then.”

 

“Bye, mom.”

 

“I love you.”

 

“You too.” She tapped the screen and the image flipped away; another couple of taps and the phone shut off. She folded up the standing legs, reached over, and slid the whole thing into its wall slot before burrowing back into the blankets and turning to look out the window. There were clouds gathering over the city, tumbling over each other to reach the horizon.

 

Soup. She’d make soup for dinner, something rich and easy to get down without chewing – her teeth and jaws were giving her trouble again – with plenty of meat in it. She had some mutton left over and could chop it up and use that. In a little while. She knew she should get up now to start dinner so she wouldn’t eat too late, but couldn’t push herself to care quite as much as she knew she ought to.

 

It started to rain while she chopped up the meat, and she knew that it meant yet another unwanted trip to the shoe store in her near future. The rain kept on throughout dinner and followed her all the way to bed, where she lay on her stomach listening to it fall against the window until she fell asleep. When she woke up it’d all turned to ice, the frost curving and feathering out across the glass.

 

In a few weeks there’d be students ice-skating on Lake Carnegie, and a few weeks after that she’d be out of a fellowship.

 

Better start on the cover letters, then.

 

-

 

By the end of the next week’s case, when Miller came through with congenital erythropoietic porphyria – House hadn’t hired her just to meet HR regulations – Cameron had gotten her references together, applied for six positions, drafted letters for three more, and was trying to take a break from staring at a computer’s screen when her mobile chirped at her. She sighed and reached over for it, half-expecting some inbox spam about cheap tapas delivery, and keyed up the screen.

 

At seven-fifteen the next day she was formally offered a position at the University of Washington Medical Center. She’d set up the phone interview the previous evening, and spent most of the time in between the calls trying to calm herself down and gussy herself up at the same time. At seven-twenty-five she’d been offered a job as a full-tenured member of the immunology department, and at seven-twenty-eight she accepted.

 

Of course she wouldn’t be starting right away, or even a few days after her fellowship ended: “I understand you’ll need to travel,” her boss-to-be smiled at her from nearly three thousand miles away, “but if you send over the necessary documents, and I’ll send you the e-mail, we can have everything ready when you are.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“We’re quite eager to have you.”

 

“Oh?”

 

“Doctor House recommended you personally. I sent him an e-mail and he called me an hour later, and told me that he never stopped being disappointed in you, but if I didn’t hire you I’d be losing my chance to make a great choice.”

 

Cameron nodded carefully. “Coming from him, that’s very high praise.”

 

When she next saw House, he was at his desk, typing away at something or other – maybe an article on the latest case with gratuitous rabbit metaphors, or some particularly scathing remark on a soap opera message board – and he didn’t glance at her when she stepped into his office. She’d gotten used to being ignored in the hospital, and in most of the places she’d used to go, and that had taken just as much getting used to as watching her hands when she reached for the milk in the fridge.

 

Of course, House hadn’t gotten to where he was by allowing himself to be ignored, and she was in pretty much the same boat. So she went ahead and applied the lessons she’d learned from him. “Why’d you call Panos?”

 

He looked over to her, almost amused. “You’re on a last-name basis already? Not ‘Doctor Panos’? Not even ‘my new boss’?”

 

“Just answer the question.”

 

“Returning a piece of communication is just polite. Don’t they teach girls that in kindergarten?”

 

“Was she the first one who called you?”

 

“If I say yes, will that be enough for you?”

 

“Is it because I’m a man now and you wanted to do a favor for me on behalf of our gender?”

 

House kept looking at her, his face sharpened. “Being a man takes years of hard work and social conditioning. Don’t think you can cheat the system by growing a penis in a week.” He went back to his typing, tuning her out again.

 

She nodded, spun around, and left his office smiling to herself.

 

-

 

Even though she wouldn’t be on the payroll in a few weeks there wasn’t time for her to worry about her fellowship ending, not when there were still patients to see and clinic hours to fill and House’s ass to cover when he didn’t bother to do it himself. She didn’t pity the next sorry fellow on the roster – then again, maybe Foreman would learn how to be the senior team member when it wasn’t temporary like last year’s stint. It’d do him some good.

 

If she’d been working in any of a dozen other departments there’d be a party with cake and balloons to see her off to her new position. If she’d been working in any of a dozen other departments she’d have told her coworkers she’d be going to begin with. Foreman and Miller would find out when she didn’t show up at work. House must have told Wilson about it, though, because the alternative was that Wilson spied on House just as much as House spied on Wilson – which was a line of thought she didn’t want to examine any more deeply than that.

 

She had to admit the pretense of offering a consult was charming, and it did leave the clinic’s exam room to themselves for a private conversation when Mrs. Yeates was out the door with the diagnosis of an aggressive and malicious rhinovirus. He hadn’t bothered to sit down, just propping himself up against the counter with his hands. “You’ve got an apartment lined up?”

 

“I made appointments to look at a few when I get there.” She finished the notation and looked up at him. “A couple of weeks in a hotel isn’t a big deal.”

 

That amused him, although she couldn’t say the reason for the faint smile. “No, it really isn’t.” He shook his head and said, “You sound like you’re managing pretty well.”

 

“Thank you.”

 

“I mean it. I’ve seen how difficult it can be for people to adjust to major diagnoses, and if there isn’t – without support they don’t get far on their own.” He had the most gentle expression, and she knew well enough by now that none of it was from pity.

 

“You haven’t been spying on me, have you?”

 

“No, House just likes to gossip.” They both chuckled at that.

 

She closed the chart and stood up to look him in the eye, something that was getting easier with practice. “I should…I guess I should thank you.”

 

“For what?”

 

“For being there for me. When I was shifting, when it started, I couldn’t even.” She looked down, falling back into old patterns. “If you hadn’t been around to help, bring over food, just everything, then –”

 

“I didn’t do it as a doctor, Allison.” She forced herself back to his eyes, thinking of the one time, her very last, after she’d cried and he’d been so strong and there with her without anyone else and he’d –

 

He reached up, took her head in his hands, pulled her in and gently so gently kissed her forehead. She gaped; it wasn’t something anyone had ever been able to do to her before. It was one of the things older brothers were supposed to do to their younger brothers when they were leaving home, going out into the world seeking their fortunes.

 

After he let go and she opened her eyes, he was smiling. “Take care of yourself.”

 

Grabbing the folder, hand on the doorknob ready to leave, “I will.”

 

“Send me a postcard when you get there.”

 

She turned around and smiled back. “I will.”

 

-

 

This was just like the time she’d moved here after her residency, down to packing the measuring cups. Weeding through everything she wasn’t going to take with her wasn’t quite the same as weeding through what she wouldn’t need anymore: everyone ate off plates but not everyone wore skirts. There wasn’t much reason for her to lug them all the way across the country, though, not when she could buy a new set of just about everything she needed when she got there. It was plenty annoying to sort through the closet and pull out the heavy winter coats she’d just bought a couple of months ago. Seattle didn’t get enough snow to make packing them worth it. She’d been glad to have them but it felt like she was throwing money away by getting rid of them so soon. Boxes of sentimental and necessary objects started to accumulate in the living room, one at a time, as she went through the different rooms trying to find what wouldn’t be worth keeping around.

 

The tampons in the bathroom, though, that’d been pretty surprising. She’d thought she’d gotten rid of everything. She’d been digging through the cupboard under the bathroom sink to get all the cleaning supplies out of there when she’d reached in and pulled out a half-full box of tampons. She knew she’d gotten the ones in the cupboard above the toilet, in her bedroom closet, in her locker at work, and the emergency ones in her purses and pack – she’d really thought she’d gotten them all. It’d been there for a while, though, so she must’ve bought it and forgotten about it sometime in the last couple of years.

 

Well, this was embarrassing. She’d really thought she’d gotten rid of everything. It was enough to make her stop and stand there for a moment, just staring at it in her hand.

 

She shrugged it off, laughing to herself, as she threw the box down into the trash and pulled the bag closed tight.

 

She fished it out later and dropped it off in the locker room the day before she left – there wasn’t much reason to just throw all of them away when other people could still use them.

 

-

 

Growing up in Chicago – even if it was one of the outlying neighborhoods instead of the city itself, something most people didn’t assume to be the case – meant, among other things, the ability to move inside a city population without any trouble thanks to years of childhood training with public transportation, public schools, and market crowds. Adjusting to Rochester had been easier than she’d thought, and Princeton was more of the same, more or less. Seattle still wasn’t as big as Chicago, but moving back to a place where she had to elbow her way through a crowd felt more comfortable than most people probably assumed to be the case.

 

Besides, expected crowd behaviors were the same for everyone. There wasn’t a chance to slip up when everyone was supposed to do the same thing, like avoid eye contact and keep their hands to themselves.

 

She settled on the third of five apartments she saw in her first two full days. It’d taken nearly a week to drive across the country, so by the time she got there all her stuff was ready and waiting at the post office for her to pick up and drive over to her new place. Furniture was next, and then a weekend’s worth of moving-in errands, then right after dropping a fifteen-cent stamped tourist postcard of the Puget Sound into a mailbox, starting work bright and early Tuesday morning. She’d have been happy enough to start Monday, but the hospital apparently preferred to do new employee orientation in large groups instead of one-on-one sessions. She grabbed a blank nametag, wrote “Cameron” on it, and got a seat near the back, finally getting something out of being taller.

 

Looking around the room, she took a quick headcount: out of the thirty-one people here, only four of them including her were male, which was about typical for the current professional demographics. The lecture itself was more of the same, nothing especially unusual that she hadn’t already heard somewhere else. How to set up your phone, information about benefits, safety plans and e-mail tips – half the time she listened and half the time she read through the brochures trying to find something interesting.

 

What was worth paying attention to was the lecture on how to avoid sexual harassment. It would’ve been more of the same – don’t tease the minority gender or your employees, and okay, what she’d done with House might well have been teasing on that first count – if it wasn’t for the fact that she had to listen to a different set of instructions now. She glanced around at the other men, all of them looking a little bored – well, they’d had to listen to it before. She shifted in her chair to make it look like she’d heard it before too, and even slouched a bit. It was the expected behavior, after all.

 

Lunch was pretty typical: sandwiches, salad, fruit, pastries, tea. Cameron took a step forward and reached for a sandwich, then remembered the right behavior for this situation and stepped back to move farther back in the line. Her stomach wasn’t happy about the new wait, but she could manage another few minutes.

 

Was she supposed to make small talk over the food? She couldn’t remember. That was the trouble with first impressions: she could only make them once, and she didn’t want to screw it up by doing it incorrectly. So she got her sandwiches and sat down before anyone could say hello. Yes, it was vital that she interact with her future co-workers, but she knew she could put that off until her stomach felt calmer with something in it. Mingling could wait a few minutes.

 

Conversation came when she got back up to get some tea; specifically, it came from a shorter – much shorter – woman ripping open a packet to get at the bag. “Hey there.”

 

“Oh, hello.” She smiled as she made eye contact, letting the other woman lead the situation.

 

“Can you believe it? Like we can’t just read the manual to dial for an outside line.”

 

“I guess they want to make sure they’ve got themselves covered.”

 

This got a laugh out of the other woman as she poured the water. “I wish. We’ll still get people complaining about what they could’ve learned already.” She stuck her hand out. “Olivia Molaro.”

 

“Oh, ah,” She wiped her hand on her jacket before sticking it out, hoping that’d cover the hesitation, “Cameron.” Molaro peered at her name tag. “Just Cameron, please.”

 

“Well, if you insist.” It was a little surprising how small her hand was, and how she tried to get a grip even so. “So what’re you here for?”

 

“Immunology. You?”

 

“Angiology. And by the way, you’ve got some excellent veins.” She jerked her head towards Cameron’s hands, and she had to glance down to take a look at them. She’d never considered them that way, but then her specialty wasn’t in blood and she couldn’t donate for another six months.

 

“Thank you.”

 

“They’re quite nice.”

 

She shrugged. “I’m happy with them.”

 

Molaro stared for a moment, then went on as she moved back towards the chairs with Cameron following, “And where’re you from?”

 

“New Jersey.”

 

That got a whistle. “Long ways away.”

 

“I guess. I’m from Chicago, so I can kind of make it out to be just halfway across the country.”

 

This time it got a laugh. “It’s still a long way to go.”

 

“Very true.” She held herself back from talking about her boss or former co-worker – House usually hid the fact he’d been all over the world if he could, and even if Chase couldn’t always mask his accent he never brought it up if he could help it or if it’d help him get a date.

 

Cameron blew on her tea to cool it and took a sip while Molaro talked about coming from Nevada and adjusting to the rain, and all the tips she’d gotten from staying in Oregon. Lunch ended pretty fast after that, and almost all of the rest of the afternoon was more of the same.

 

“Okay, a nice big smile now.” The photographer looked frazzled enough Cameron didn’t try to make small talk; she just thought about interrupting starfish and held the expression. The light flashed, and she got down from the stool. “You’ll pick up your ID card over there.”

 

At the desk, there was something new. “Doctor Cameron? There’s a bit of a problem.”

 

“I thought I filled out everything.”

 

The secretary smiled and shook his head. “On your form right here, you didn’t put down a gender.”

 

She drew back and tried not to show it. “I must have missed that.”

 

He smiled without his eyes and shrugged. “It was just one entry, but we do need it.”

 

“Can I ask what for?”

 

“Just to make sure we have everything in place. Regulations and all that.”

 

Cameron opened her mouth, closed it, then asked, “Could I see another ID card?”

 

“Sure.” He handed it over; she turned it over in her hands.

 

“And this is all confidential information?”

 

“Yes.” He wanted to get the line moving, and so did she, so she took a pen and filled in the correct box.

 

He took a glance at what she’d filled in and his mouth suddenly turned down. “Here’s your ID. Have a good day.” She took it without touching his hands.

 

The immunology department was on the second floor, across the hall from the main pathology laboratory. Her office didn’t have any windows, but she could work with it, and spent a few minutes getting her frustrations over general public pity out of her system by pushing her desk and bookcases around. At least the name on the door said “A. Cameron” like she’d asked. After three years of working for House she’d learned how to be properly paranoid.

 

Once her desk was in place and her bookshelves were too, she adjusted her tie on reflex, smoothed back her hair, and went to introduce herself to the rest of her department. Everyone seemed happy enough to see her, offering advice for where to eat out in her neighborhood and where their husbands shopped for their clothes.

 

That night, lying in bed and trying to fall asleep, she jerked awake when she realized Molaro must have been trying to flirt with her.

 

Oh, shit. Talk about making a good first impression, all right.

 

Thankfully tracking Molaro down wasn’t hard: all she needed to do was check in the staff directory. Getting the words together to apologize was trickier, but ultimately useless.

 

“You couldn’t tell?”

 

“No.”

 

“You really couldn’t tell?” Cameron just shook her head. “Well, that’s – I mean, how come you couldn’t tell?”

 

She shook her head, trying to come up with something polite, settling on, “I’m not used to women flirting with me.”

 

Molaro snorted. “Where did you go to school? The one I went to was six-to-one in favor of the guys. They never had to worry about getting a date.”

 

Cameron hadn’t had to worry about it either, but she’d never been afraid to ask for one and had almost never heard anyone say no. She decided to go with the truth. “The thing is I got married pretty young. My – my spouse died just a few months after we got married.”

 

“Oh my god. I’m so sorry.” She looked so apologetic it almost hurt.

 

“You don’t need to be. I mean, they died five years ago, but it, it was pretty intense.”

 

“Oh, Cameron.” Someone peeked around the shelf and Molaro shooed her away with a firm glance and wave of her hand, leaving them in privacy again. “I’m really sorry. Is there anything –”

 

“You don’t need to do anything. I just wanted to explain to you.”

 

She nodded, mouth set. “I appreciate that.” She looked right into Cameron’s eyes. “I’d love it if I could apologize by offering to take you out to dinner, but I don’t think that’s a polite option anymore.”

 

Cameron smiled. This time she knew what was going on, and how to deal with it. “There are worse ways to get dates. But how about I take the invitation and let you know when I feel up to it?”

 

“I suppose that’ll work.”

 

She didn’t want to resort to it, but took the easy way out: glancing at her watch, commenting on the time, and hurrying upstairs to her office, where she collapsed in her chair for nearly ten minutes.

 

-

 

Thankfully, Molaro wasn’t one to gossip, and neither were her co-workers. After that morning, Cameron doubled her efforts to fit in, and quickly became known by the reputation she’d wanted, as one of the hardest-working doctors in the hospital.

 

She ran labs, wrote up treatment plans, kept her door open for consults, charted superbly, and did her rounds without complaint or fail or tardiness. She didn’t go so far as to bring dumplings for the immunology break room each week but was never too busy to say hello or good morning or spare a few minutes for them to chat, even on days she wasn’t feeling quite so social. She understood it was necessary, because she had to work twice as hard as she used to in order to get where she wanted to go. It was how her world worked now.

 

Her sister sent her a pair of sunlamps, and one went in her bedroom and the other went on top of a bookcase, giving the whole of their small rooms more of a feeling of being real living spaces. She got art prints at museums, hung a mirror in her office to give it the illusion of space, and stocked her fridge with imported Californian meat. She bought a decent pair of running shoes and got used to getting up early enough for foggy morning runs, and after a lot of deliberation decided against physical therapy in the hospital and just got a yoga tape. She still qualified for it, but she didn’t want to deal with anyone she knew finding out what she was doing and why, even if it’d still be useful. Figuring out where her body was in space still wasn’t something she’d mastered: every so often she’d find a bruise in the shower and wonder how that happened. She could only answer that question about half the time.

 

She’d bought a Little Blue Planet guide to the city and tried to use it, ticking off the important scenes and sights all residents were supposed to be fluent with; instead, most of her weekends and free time that didn’t involve work or some sort of exercise she did as little as possible. Most days she felt more worn out from having to hold herself just right or constantly checking how she was talking to the other doctors than from the running and weightlifting.

 

And it wasn’t that she wasn’t talking to them, or eating lunch with them – when she realized Zeno’s paradox applied to her now, for never being able to get back to the place where she could just walk into the lounge, sit down, and jump into the conversation without even thinking about it. For anyone, in any room.

 

-

 

Cameron didn’t usually remember them. She’d wake up, realize the sheets were sticky, and got embarrassed even though there wasn’t anyone around to know it. This night was different.

 

She’d been at a party – it’d been in a huge house, like something from a movie, and she’d walked through a garden to get to the kitchen, where she’d stolen bread off a plate and the waiter made her to apologize to the chef. She’d gone away and then someone had taken her hand and took her upstairs. She hadn’t looked at his face but his hands were so much bigger than hers, she remembered that. He’d taken her to his bedroom, laid her down on the bed – she hadn’t taken off her dress but she wasn’t wearing anything – and he’d rubbed her breasts in his hands and dipped his hands down her hips and she’d wanted something deep inside herself that pushed and ached and she’d wanted him to go inside and he pressed his hand up against her cunny and –

 

She woke up sweating, her penis slowly softening in her pajamas. She’d never remembered one before, and she wished she hadn’t remembered this one, either. Wiping her hands over her face, kicking the blankets off, she stumbled out of bed and to her knees, rocking back and forth and trying not to cry.

 

This time she took a hot shower before she changed the sheets, as hot as she could stand, and took another one after her morning run.

 

-

 

She’d learned the hard way to keep her door closed; if she didn’t, people read it as an invitation to come in without asking if she had a minute to share. It wasn’t something she was used to, having to set that boundary – she’d forgotten to not assume it was there to begin with. So when Caletti knocked and asked if she could come in for a consult without just stepping inside, Cameron took a moment to sigh in relief before opening the door.

 

Caletti filled her in on her patient’s symptoms while Cameron scrolled through the file’s charts – admitted with fever, joint pain, loss of feeling in the hands, and dangerously fast weight loss. “It’s not moving like lupus, but we’re not sure what it’s moving like.”

 

Cameron held herself back from channeling her boss, reread a couple of notes, and felt the pieces lock into place. “It’s polyarteritis nodosa.”

 

“That’s a pretty unusual diagnosis.”

 

Instead of just telling her, she scrolled back up to one of the charts and pointed to what she wanted to talk about. “There’s no family history of hypertension, no previous symptoms of it, and this goes back eight years – she doesn’t even have elevated sodium levels. She also doesn’t have dry eyes, weird bruises, or any depression or anxiety that wouldn’t come from being in a hospital.”

 

“You’re sure about it?”

 

“Sure enough that I think you ought to get a biopsy and check her creatinine levels.”

 

She was right, of course, and unlike her old boss didn’t go out of her way to make sure everyone knew she’d saved someone’s life by recognizing the disease for what it was. She’d done her job, so she went back to her office to get some more of her next article drafted. She could find someone to proof it when she’d finished the rough draft.

 

A couple of hours later, after she’d shrugged on her raincoat and locked her door, Farkas waylaid her in the hall. “Hey, Cameron.” She was in a better-cut dress than usual, something Cameron wouldn’t have worn to work on a day she might’ve had someone vomit on her.

 

“Oh, hello.”

 

She glanced around like she was checking for something, then looked back to Cameron’s face. “Listen, Chen’s got a group going to go out for drinks if you wanted to come along.”

 

“And if I don’t?”

 

“I’ll still go out for drinks, but you won’t be coming with me. Your loss.”

 

It was a very tempting offer, and the idea of going out to have drinks with someone for the first time in an embarrassingly large number of months sounded really good, but at the same time given the language she’d used, “I just want to be clear about one thing. Are you asking me out on a date?”

 

Farkas looked around again. “If you’re coming along, then yeah. If not, then I’ll be going out for drinks with some friends.”

 

Cameron smiled and, for a moment, considered going into some sort of soliloquy about asking friends to perform smokescreen favors and the courage in asking outright, but skipped it, going right to lying. “I’d love to.” She didn’t want to go, not really, but she knew if she did this it’d be easier to talk to them in the future. Besides, if everyone was drunk, a few slips in behavior could be forgiven.

 

The bar was three blocks away, someplace specializing in imports and mixed drinks. Everyone else sat at the bar, leaving the two of them to their own table. Farkas got a Belgian white and Cameron got a Valentine’s Massacre. She didn’t like her drinks that sweet, but she knew it’d look weird if she ordered a beer. She took a small sip and waited for Farkas to start the conversation. She hoped it wouldn’t fall to a ‘do you like movies because I like movies’ middle-school level of embarrassment. And it wasn’t as though she would mind talking about the movies – she hadn’t seen anything in a theater for ages but so what? – because it meant she’d be talking to someone outside of work about something which wasn’t work.

 

She’d talked to Chase about this sort of thing once, about four months into her fellowship. Her theory was that being a good doctor meant you didn’t have much time for any social life until you got out of med school and into actual paying jobs. This meant that unless you were some sort of genius you didn’t have much in terms of conversation skills that didn’t involve the human body breaking in one way or another.

 

Given that Farkas was also an immunologist and they both knew what’d been going on in the department that week, there wasn’t even much gossip to share. Cameron took a larger sip.

 

What the hell. “So how do we do this?”

 

Farkas took a drink. “I think we just start talking.”

 

“Okay.” Sadly, the Massacre didn’t get better the more of it she drank. “So do you like movies?”

 

“Nah, I prefer TV. Fits my schedule better.”

 

“Yeah. There’s a bunch of shows I keep wanting to catch up on when they hit the networks, but I keep forgetting.”

 

“What did you watch?”

 

“_Global Frequency, Brimstone, Traveler, Wonderfalls, John ­_– um, yes?”

 

Farkas was smiling at her in a way Cameron had come to learn meant she was doing something wrong, but not so wrong she needed reprimanding. “Those aren’t shows I’d expect you to like.”

 

“What’s wrong with wanting a little plot?”

 

“I’d just thought you’d watch _Grand_ or _Andy Richter Controls the Universe_, something like that.”

 

“Ah.” She really didn’t like how Farkas was looking at her right now. “Well, it’s, I always babysat my little sister, so I kind of picked up on that sort of show. I never really got into dramas.”

 

“Oh!” Cameron knew by now that was a good sort of smile. And she hadn’t needed to lie, either. “That’s so nice, that you did that.”

 

“Well, my mother was happy about it.” She smiled, took another drink, and held herself back from going on about anything more personal. As it turned out, Farkas liked most of the same shows, and almost immediately promised she’d copy them over for Cameron to watch later. At least she didn’t pull Cameron over to everyone else at the bar to show off the rarity of a man who liked shows marketed to women.

 

Sure enough, two days later, Farkas passed six burned discs into her hand, one for each season of the shows she had that Cameron had missed. She promised she’d start catching up that weekend – “I don’t have any outstanding patients right now, and there isn’t much I –”

 

“You work too hard, you know that?” She shook her head. “Why do you think I’m going to invite you out again tonight?”

 

“Wait, I’m sorry, you will be?”

 

“I can’t invite you out for dinner before lunch. Hospital regs.”

 

Okay, this wasn’t something Cameron was comfortable with. “Maria, I’m really glad you want to take me out to dinner –”

 

“And here it comes.” Farkas sighed. “‘I think you’re great but let’s be friends.’ I get it all the time. You’d think I’d stop dating from the hospital, but it’s hard to get out and meet people. I know, a man’s gotta work hard to get ahead in this field, but jeez. I should be used to it by now.”

 

“Look I mean – no, yes, I mean, no, I don’t want to be involved with you romantically, but yes, I would like to be friends. With you. Really.”

 

“You like me but you’re not looking for romance.”

 

“Right.”

 

“And you do want to be friends.”

 

“Right.” She looked away, face tight. Cameron didn’t know what to do to make that particular expression go away, so she kept on even though she wasn’t sure if she was supposed to. “Look, the last job I had, I slept with – with someone in my department, and it was good but it was, it got weird. And I don’t want this to get weird.”

 

“So it’d be okay if I was in surgery or pediatrics?”

 

“Yes. I mean – look, I don’t want to make it –”

 

Farkas held up her hand and Cameron obediently stopped blabbering on. “I understand what you’re trying to say.” She looked away, then back to Cameron, pointing at the discs she realized she was gripping tight enough to hurt her knuckles. “Then watch those this weekend so we can talk on Monday.”

 

“I will.”

 

When she left work that night, she felt the same sort of endorphin high she usually got after a heavy workout or run – she’d done something good and beneficial, and she wouldn’t be so severely isolated from her co-workers any more. She’d done it genuinely, correctly, the way a man was supposed to act in this situation. And she hadn’t even needed to come out about herself to do it.

 

The brief idea of the relationship, though, had stirred up something. Men tended to prefer romances and dramas and women liked heavy plots and the supernatural, but the idea of finding love on the other side of the galaxy or fighting through Hell and back to get it was the sort of trope everyone used.

 

That Tuesday, heading towards the lounge, she heard Farkas chatting with Rigazzi and Magpiong from the doorway: “I get what he was talking about,” she laughed. “I can’t blame him – that sort of thing’s harder for men. They can’t divorce their feelings from what they do.”

 

Cameron flattened herself against the wall, trying to keep her breathing down as Magpiong chuckled. “Tell me about it. My boyfriend, he’s great, but try criticizing his cooking without getting him into what’s on the plate.”

 

“It’s weird, though – Cameron usually takes this stuff pretty well. He really holds himself around people. I mean, he’s usually good at talking to people.”

 

“Maybe he was right,” Rigazzi piped in. “Maybe he really isn’t looking for romance right now.”

 

“You think I should wait for him to be ready?”

 

“I think you should just find someone else to go after.”

 

Women. Farkas meant Cameron was good at talking to women. Of course she was good: she’d been talking like one her whole life. She walked back down the hallway, turned around, and walked back, nearly stomping down in her wing-tips to make more noise than was really necessary to let them know she was coming.

 

This time, they looked up when she pushed the door open and gave a generic “Good morning” as greeting as she made her way to the kettle.

 

“Hey,” Farkas said. “How’s your viewing coming?”

 

“I finished the second season of _Brimstone_ last night_._”

 

“Tell me that finale didn’t make you cry.”

 

“I would, but I’d be lying.”

 

Rigazzi was flipping through TV channels. By the time the water was boiling, she’d settled on a news broadcast about the three Presidents Kennedy celebrating the youngest’s birthday. Cameron watched while her tea steeped, then politely declined Farkas’ invitation to stay and watch with them.

 

She considered calling someone she didn’t have to act with – maybe her mom, maybe Wilson, she could look up Chase in Galveston and surprise him, she could see how her sister was doing. After several minutes of thinking about it, she switched over to staring at the wall. Maybe the fact that she wasn’t crying behind a locked door was a sign of improved coping abilities. Then again, what she’d heard – well, she didn’t know what men said when they gossiped about women who didn’t want to get into relationships with them. She knew they did, but she’d never made any effort to hang out with the nursing staff, or anyone outside of her department, for that matter. There were rules for what men did, and what doctors did, and sometimes they went up against each other.

 

-

 

Washing short hair still wasn’t something she was used to – she’d reach the top of her head and every so often be surprised there wasn’t anything more to lather up. It wasn’t like shaving in the morning, where she’d added a new thing to her morning schedule and get up a few minutes early to make sure there was time for everything it needed to go right. And it didn’t matter that nobody saw what she did, because she knew she had to do everything, from the hot towel to the aftershave. Which embarrassingly smelled like cucumber, but that was the in scent for modern men. Everyone was a slave to fashion.

 

In the shower, she hadn’t needed to change her routine too much. She still washed her hair and scrubbed behind her ears and between her toes. Mostly, now she checked what bruises were new and how the old ones were healing, and didn’t look right down there.

 

Some days that was easier than others. She clenched her jaw and looked up at the ceiling, trying not to think about what was going on between her legs. All she’d been doing was enjoying the warm water and thinking about the last episodes of _Journeyman_ with the hero shirtless again and she didn’t know how but she hadn’t noticed it getting attention and suddenly when she turned the water off to shampoo her hair she realized she had an erection.

 

Not a big one, though. Just one that said it was there. She could turn the cold water back on and it’d go away right away, but for now, inside the steam it didn’t feel too bad. She was warm all over, and it was warm too. Just…warm. That was it.

 

She grabbed the shampoo bottle, tipped it to squeeze some out, holding it in the air before putting it back. It’d been a long day yesterday and she hadn’t slept well last night, and the hot air was making her feel just a bit light-headed. Just a bit, just enough that she didn’t want to turn on the cold water and trade a hard-on for a headache.

 

Hard-on. It was hard, and it was on her, and it was turned on, all right. Still not all the way, but on its way there.

 

God, she could practically hear House cheering her on, telling her to man up and try it out at least once.

 

She closed her eyes and gently reached down, like it’d get scared away if she made any sudden moves. She’d gone down here a couple of times – scratching an itch through layers of clothing, slipping when she washed her chest – and it wasn’t like she never touched it, but she’d never done anything like this before.

 

Okay, there was that one time she hadn’t woken up all the way and ended up on her stomach and rubbing against the mattress through her pajamas and the sheets, but she hadn’t touched herself and she hadn’t come and it only lasted for a few minutes before she got up to get the frozen peas.

 

Right now, she was just…touching it. Just holding it, and not doing anything else. And that was okay: she didn’t have to move her hand to feel its weight, its heft. She still didn’t look down as she gripped it softer, then tighter, just to see how it felt when she did that. She hadn’t been expecting anything major to happen, just for it to maybe get a bit harder, but as it turned out it felt good when she held it tighter. It felt warmer. Her breathing picked up, sharp breaths coming in and out. She gripped it tight again; she felt it move in her hand, without her doing anything, she felt blood move to her face and it must be moving from her legs because they were shaking and she had to brace her left hand against the tiles as she gripped it tight again because it felt so fucking good. Just good, good like rubbing her clit her pretty little nub and this didn’t give her that same pushing shining hurting pressure between her legs but it was still hurting pressure between her legs and she knew that. It was almost what she knew.

 

She held it tight, moved her hand up and down, now really up and down now that it was turned on all the way. All the way hard, all the way ready, oh fuck. She knew she should let go and turn the water on cold full blast but oh fuck it was pressure, pressure, tight pressure outside of her and she’d never felt anything like it in her life before not even when she dreamed –

 

She gasped, heard a sound, and blinked her eyes open. It couldn’t be over that fast, except it was, with what was on her hand and splattered against the wall as proof of that. She didn’t dare collapse even though she really wanted to; instead, she reached over and turned the water back on. Warm, not cold; she didn’t need cold water to make it go away. She’d done that just fine on her own.

 

Watching the semen and all its ingredients wash down the drain, scrubbing underneath her fingernails, she didn’t feel like her body was humming, mostly like she’d just run ten miles without a break.

 

As a respectable scientist and doctor she knew that as experiments went this wasn’t a good one at all. She’d started out with a strange set of variables without any baseline, she hadn’t tried starting from the beginning but just jumped in, she hadn’t made any effort to track her data. But on the other hand, the one which hadn’t done anything, she’d tested it out just fine, and she’d learned that everything worked – and she liked what she’d worked with. It’d worked nicely.

 

All the wanted to do was crawl back into bed and sleep for ten hours, but she washed her hair instead, shaved off the night’s beard growth, and got dressed and went into work, grabbing some morning teriyaki take-out because she’d run out of time for breakfast.

 

If anyone knew what she’d just done – if there was any change in how she walked, if something showed up on her face when she glanced at people as she walked down the halls – nobody stopped her to ask about it. Which was about the same as not noticing.

 

-

 

Men asking women out on dates wasn’t so strange, thankfully, and the way the gender ratio was skewed at hospitals meant people expected her to have plenty of potential dates to choose from and ask out. It wouldn’t do her any good to be a serial womanizer, but she knew she’d been working here long enough to start being properly social. So she went to see Molaro again to take her up on the dinner invitation, who was more than pleased.

 

“I’ll pick you up around seven on Saturday.”

 

“Shouldn’t I be the one who picks you up?”

 

“You could, but I was the one who invited you to start with. That’s how it works these days.”

 

“You’ve been watching too many movies.”

 

“Maybe, but I’m still picking you up. I’ll need your address.” As Cameron was writing, she added, “And I’ll need to know what to call you.”

 

“I’m sorry?”

 

“If it’s going to be casual, I can’t keep calling you Cameron. What does the A stand for?”

 

“A –ah.” She knew she only had a moment to panic and think of something without looking silly, “Al. Al works. Just call me Al.”

 

It didn’t really work, but it helped her get through the following dinner without too much trouble or having to remember to answer to something like Henry or William or Charles. By the standards of the restaurant guides, it was an excellent dinner, and by Cameron’s measure, the fact that Molaro – Portia, who’d been raised by two English professors – wanted to do it again meant she’d done something right.

 

The first time out was French food and a getting-to-know-you dinner. The second time, Portia took her to a local production of _1778_, and by the fifth time they ended up at her place at the end of the night. This was where Cameron felt herself fall apart a little bit. She knew exactly what was expected of her at this point, and what she should do, but just looking at her at the other side of the couch wasn’t doing anyone any favors.

 

She tried to remember what she’d wished guys had done, and tried to do it: she scooted over carefully as Portia came closer, she reached out and took her face – God, how had her hands gotten so big? – and leaned in, very gently, and kissed her without opening her mouth. Let her do that if she wanted.

 

It’d been a long, long time since she’d kissed anyone. It didn’t feel bad to do it again after so long. Her lips were warm, smooth, thin, moving softly to open and let her tongue out to stroke over Cameron’s own lips, and that made her pull back.

 

“Is something wrong?”

 

“No,” Cameron protested. “It’s fine. Just – I haven’t kissed anyone in a long time, that’s all.”

 

“Well, you haven’t forgotten how.” She moved back, started kissing again, her mouth opening fast and Cameron reciprocating. She wanted this, this was good, here was a woman with her, that was all good, and this was what she was supposed to be doing. She kept kissing, and it was the kissing and holding someone that felt good, something she hadn’t done in almost a year. And somehow she thought that kissing and holding just about anyone would feel good and it didn’t have to be a woman. Just the being this close to someone.

 

“You’re not enjoying yourself.” Portia didn’t say it to judge or criticize or condemn, but to express her awareness of Cameron’s state in her words and her feelings about it in her tone.

 

“No, I am, I swear.”

 

“No, you’re not.” She pulled away and flopped down on the cushions.

 

“Okay, you’re right.” Portia looked over at her. “But it’s not you, and it’s not that I still miss my spouse. I don’t know what it is.” She sighed and looked at the print on the far side of the room, cast in abstract shadow from the lampshade. “Maybe we’re just not right for each other. I mean, what do we have in common besides liking French food and musical theater? That’s a friendship, not a romance.”

 

“I guess so.” She got up, rubbed her eyes, and shook her head.

 

“I was hoping it’d work out, but it’s been getting…”

 

“No, I know what you mean.” She jerked her thumb to her kitchen. “You want some tea?”

 

“Sure.”

 

Molaro was kind enough to give Cameron a ride back to her place, and to her credit, it wasn’t strange at work. It helped they didn’t see each other too much. She’d also been kind enough to pick Cameron up from work twice, but that was mostly for Cameron’s benefit under the pretense of Molaro knowing where they’d eat that night.

 

She kept thinking about what she’d stumbled onto during that kiss on the couch. Just being up close with someone, and how it’d be good to get there again.

 

-

 

There were plenty of bars in the city that the Little Blue guide had tagged for what she wanted to do, but she didn’t have anything to wear for them. She pushed suit after suit aside in her closet, dismissed her workout clothes out of hand, and finally dug out the first two pairs of male shirts and pants she’d bought, down at the bottom of one of her drawers, that she hadn’t worn in nearly a year.

 

She showered, shaved, dabbed on the perfume, buffed and shined her nails, and hit the bar scene early. But not too early; she knew what she was doing, and she’d have to wait a bit for the timing to be best. She nursed her Snowball Fight for a half-hour before she went to talk to anyone; fortunately, drinking alone wasn’t a strange thing to do, no matter what gender you were.

 

The bar was almost all full – psoriasis, arthritis, multiple sclerosis, rhinovirus, Huntington’s – with people alone and in pairs and one louder group off in the back. There was one woman alone a couple of people away that Cameron took a better look at when she got up to use the bathroom, and going from her body language she probably had a shot at pulling this stunt off.

 

It turned out to be a lot easier than she’d thought. All she needed to do, really, was remember what she wished men had said to her when she’d been in the same situation, and say those things to her, be kind and nod in the right places, and when she was done with her tirade come right out and make the suggestion. Nancy stared at her, and she said, “It’s just for tonight.”

 

“And this isn’t some elaborate practical joke.”

 

“Nope. I just want to fuck you.”

 

Nancy looked Cameron up and down, pursed her lips, and gulped down the last of her beer. “Okay.”

 

“Your place.”

 

“Great.”

 

“I’ll get a cab.” When she’d been younger, much younger, she’d wished someone had been smart enough to say all this to her, to cut through the crap of greeting cards and badly-written movies so she didn’t have to take the risks to get what she’d wanted.

 

She tossed a five onto the bar next to the glass. “Right behind you.”

 

In the taxi, they sat on opposite sides of the backseat, even though everyone in the cab knew what was coming – a necessary pretense. They wound up in Nancy’s living room, a two-bedroom place on the Eastside, with Nancy standing in the middle of the room holding her hands together after throwing her coat and bag onto the sofa. “My roommate’s gone for the weekend.”

 

“Perfect.”

 

“You got condoms? There’s some in the…the…”

 

“No, I’ve got.”

 

“Okay.” She jerked her thumb to the bedroom. “Let’s get started.” She began to make her way there, undressing as she went; Cameron waited a minute to pull off her shoes and socks before following after, grabbing her shirt and pulling it off over her head the way she’d seen everyone do it in the movies before shucking off her pants. Nancy was already naked and all over her, pushing her down onto the bed, running her fingers through her hair and over her head, strong and warn and good. She grabbed her head in return and pulled her down, kissing her deep and firm, letting her open her mouth first and then running her tongue over Nancy’s own, relishing the taste of the beer and the sharp taste of someone else.

 

Cameron opened her mouth wider, let Nancy in, let her trust in this strange man. “Al…”

 

When she said it like that, it sounded like she was trying to say her name. Cameron let out a groan from somewhere low in her chest, felt herself respond the way she was supposed to react to this – that tight pressure outside of herself, the old feeling inverted outward, that same need for being closer. Down between her legs was the smartest thing she had and it always knew what it wanted down there and now that was someone, it was this woman, this Nancy, and right now as far as Cameron knew she needed to be in her. Inside her, deep, in her wet –

 

Oh, she remembered what she wanted: she growled from a place she didn’t know, flipped Nancy over, and stuck her hand between her legs, finding just the right spot, that strong little spot. Cameron started rubbing, not too hard and not too soft the way she knew from the inside out, using her index finger and letting her middle slip in deeper into her body, right where her penis was telling and demanding it go but not just yet, not until she’d had Nancy come. She’d tried feeling inside herself but this was different, this she had to do just right. She’d always wished a man knew this and she was a man knowing this and she should see it to rights. Nancy started hissing and panting and shaking her hips, Cameron leaned in to kiss as she pressed her hand in deeper, let her feel her hard-on where it pressed against her thigh – Nancy pulled back from the kiss eyes shut tight and whimpered out her climax, soft from her mouth and hard around Cameron’s fingers.

 

She looked up at Cameron with the face she’d only seen on a few patients. She was thankful, she was grateful.

 

Cameron smiled back down. “Gimme a sec.” She got up, went back to her pants, and pulled a wrapper out of the pocket, stopping for a moment to take note of her erection: reaching down to heft it, feel its heat and the little bit of fluid leaking out the end. She knew better than to taste it.

 

Back in bed, she held up her prize, Nancy grinning. “Gimmie.” Cameron rolled onto her back, letting Nancy roll it down and gasping the moment her hand touched her penis, her hips bucking up and her balls suddenly feeling tight too and it was almost too much and she had to pull herself back and hold the pleasure inside. Nancy looked at her curiously; Cameron grabbed her and pulled her on top of her. She got the message, grabbing Cameron’s penis again – and she spend the night happy with nothing but Nancy touching her penis – and pushed it up inside of her. It was just a little bit but it was warm and so much more than she’d thought and she pushed up, wanting and getting more of it and Nancy pushing down and then she was inside and she stared up at Nancy with her mouth wide open trying to breathe.

 

Nancy started to move, sliding up and down, and Cameron couldn’t do anything but move along with her, trying to follow her and stay inside. Nancy slapped her hands down on Cameron’s shoulders and somehow moved harder and faster and it was more, and Cameron grabbed her waist and jerked her hips and threw her head back and it was the strongest thing the biggest the slamming-shooting pleasure coming right out of her.

 

She lay back against the pillows. Nancy was still there, looking at her again. Cameron smiled, not having the energy for anything but that, and rubbing one out of her again.

 

“Let me get that for you.” She pulled off the condom, knotted it off and tossed it aside. Cameron felt sticky, but also too tired to move. Well, move more than roll to the other side of the bed.

 

Nancy let her use her comb, shared her oatmeal, and called her a taxi. Back in her apartment, Cameron changed into fresh clothes, trying to see if and how she felt different. It’d been fucking spectacular, to say the least, and she wanted to do it again as soon as she could. She would’ve done it again that morning but Nancy got out of bed first.

 

What she kept turning over in her head, what she loved, was that she’d done something so utterly male, so unquestionably male. And nobody had been able to guess anything else.

 

-

 

By now she managed like a natural. She still had to check herself and think about what she was doing, but almost none of it was something she had to stop and think about. She knew how to be careful around patients to put them at ease, how to get herself taken seriously in a conversation, how to say hello depending on whether she was in a restaurant or meeting a prominent Parkinson’s researcher and activist. Some of it was still troubling, things she couldn’t predict – the way she was supposed to sit on a couch was something she still had to check to do right, and usually had to correct.

 

She was getting so much better at playing the part, and felt so proud of herself for not digging through the freezer anymore, she went up to see Rita Miller. She was an endocrinologist and had called Cameron up to her office about a month ago for a consultation on what turned out to be polymyositis. They’d talked a couple of times since then, casual good-mornings and how-do-you-dos in the elevators and cafeteria. She was a bit older than Cameron, wore her hair in a loose bun most of the time, didn’t have any photographs of people on her desk, and smiled when Cameron came into her office. “Anything I can help you with?”

 

“One thing. I know this is on short notice, but I hope you can come through for me.”

 

“What is it?”

 

“I’d like to eat dinner with someone tomorrow night, and I’d like that to be you.”

 

She knew it was lame, and she could tell Miller didn’t think too much of it either. Cameron also knew to keep her mouth shut, and not break out into a huge smile when Miller said, “Sure. That sounds fun.”

 

“Great! That’s great,” She pulled in a breath. “Japanese good for you?”

 

“You’re the one who asked me out. You can pick the place. Just call me to let me know where it is.”

 

They ended up in a Japanese fusion place near Cameron’s house she hadn’t been to yet but always thought looked good after she’d read the menu posted by the door. Not too many places served cow, which Miller noticed when she opened the menu at the table and scanned down to the main dinner section.

 

“It’s a good meat,” Cameron assured her. “Tastes just like goat.”

 

“I know, I’ve had it. Just not in a long time.” She kept reading. “Oh, it’s from Canada. That makes sense.”

 

“I had it a lot when I was a kid, but not much since then. Sometimes I see it at the butcher shop, but it’s supposed to be hard to work with, so I don’t get it.”

 

“Leave it to the professionals?”

 

“Pretty much.”

 

Miller ended up getting the beef udon; Cameron went for the Dungeness crab. After the waiter took their orders, Miller asked, “So what should I call you?”

 

Sometimes it was nice to be reminded not everyone had been trained to snoop and spy on everyone else. “Al’s fine.”

 

“Is that short for Albert? Allen?”

 

“Just Al.”

 

Miller paused, then shrugged. “I knew a guy named Max once. Just Max, not Maxwell or Maximilian. I guess it cuts down on paperwork.”

 

Cameron laughed, then clapped her hand over her mouth to hide it. “Not really. It’d be nice if it did, but I’ve gotta sign just as many forms as you do.” More, if anything. “So,” she didn’t want to leave it hanging on paperwork, “how was the conference you went to last month? Portland, right?”

 

“Yeah, Portland. It rained the whole time, and getting to the hotel from the station was a bear, but they liked my paper on mosaics and the catering was good.” She smiled. “I did get to be a tourist for a couple of hours on Saturday and head out to the Japanese gardens.”

 

“Tell me about those.” Leaning in, talking about what the other person was enthusiastic about, were good conversational skills no matter what gender you were. Cameron was just happy she could put them to good use and let Rita do the talking at the same time.

 

“It’s really lush, and they worked the plants with the landscape – you know, the hills and all that. I saw one gardener clipping a bush with these tiny clips,” she held her thumb and forefinger to illustrate, “And there was this crazy thing that went ‘doink,’ water would fill this bamboo piece and it’d fall down and make that sound and go back up. The guide told me it was supposed to scare deer away.” Cameron nodded for her to go on, and she did until the food came, which was when the conversation switched over to what they were eating, which moved to food in the Midwest and food on a coast. This moved over to the fact that nobody had any time to cook anymore.

 

“I want to, and I know it’s healthier and better, but if I want something hot waiting for me at the end of the day…”

 

Cameron nodded. “Crockpots. Slow cookers. I got one – um, a little over a year ago, and it’s saved me so many times. A half-hour of chopping everything and I can relax the rest of the day and not have to move if I don’t want to.”

 

“Really?”

 

“I still use it. Back when I got it, I got into the habit of cooking for myself, so I just kept with it. I figured with how much I eat, it’s cheaper than ordering in all the time or frozen shepherd’s pies.”

 

“I’d say so.”

 

Cameron blushed; she’d eaten nearly all of the tempura and edamame. “I work out a lot.”

 

Rita shook her head. “How do you have time for all this stuff with all the work you do?”

 

She considered giving the real answer of not having a personal life but shrugged and said, “I just try to make it work, that’s all.”

 

“Yeah, but how do you make it work? Do you have some secret?”

 

“If I did, I’d sell it and retire.”

 

They kept talking throughout dessert and the short walk back; Rita promised to call Cameron, and even though she wanted to, she made sure not to call her back, because that wasn’t what men did. She was proud of herself for not diving for the phone when she heard it ring, but waited to pick it up after two and answered as casually as she could.

 

-

 

Rita wasn’t technically a native to Seattle: she’d grown up just North in Lake Forest Park, which apparently fought tooth and nail to not be just another suburban area, which she explained over a slow lunch at Bacco in the Market that Saturday.

 

“Maybe you could take me sometime.”

 

“We could make a day out of it.”

 

“Pack a lunch, show me the woods.”

 

“Put it on the list.”

 

Even if she wasn’t native to the city, she’d lived in it full-time since college, and knew the in and outs of it the way House knew how to hide in closets and exam rooms. Their third date was supposed to be movie and dinner at an Duwamish restaurant with modernized dishes, but after Rita heard Cameron hadn’t been to the Museum of Flight yet, even after she’d worked down a checklist, she changed the reservation and called Cameron right back, telling her not to worry about the rebooking.

 

She did her best to take it in stride, to not get annoyed or angry about any of this, but she’d always been the one to go forward and make the plans, and to have so little input on it this time around took some getting used to. This wasn’t the time to make a fuss about how people usually dated. Still, no matter what she did, she couldn’t deny how much fun it was to get shown the sights by someone who knew what she was supposed to see.

 

Rita was waiting for her at the museum, and when she arrived, did a double-take.

 

“What? What is it?”

 

“Nothing, I just…I haven’t seen you in anything like this.”

 

She’d gotten some new long-sleeved t-shirts and jeans after she realized she’d need casual clothes, but still wouldn’t go to work in anything less than a jacket and tie. It felt weird to go out in so little, but she was still covered. She smiled and shrugged, “I like to dress nicely for work,” and left it at that.

 

“Ahhh.”

 

“I got in the habit a while back. I like the – I think it’s a good thing to do, to present myself, should we go inside?”

 

“Sure.” Once they were in, Rita couldn’t slow down, the museum wouldn’t let her, and Cameron didn’t mind: it wasn’t the biggest, most elaborate museum she’d ever been to, but her enjoyment was infectious, and it really was a fascinating subject. There were model hot-air balloons and early airplanes, and cockpits she could climb into, and a temporary exhibit on modern European aircraft.

 

“Wow.” Rita stepped under the wing, tapping on the side of the plane. “Thirty-six people can sit in here.”

 

“And that’s not counting the pilot.” According to the placards, it was the latest in German engineering, designed as a joint project with English and Australian companies, and the world’s first stab at commercial air travel. “Thirty-six people, Cairnes to Perth.”

 

“London to Paris?”

 

“That too.”

 

“Have you ever been in one?”

 

“No. I’d love to, though – it’s always sounded so amazing.”

 

“I can’t even imagine what it’s like. I got to ride in a hot air balloon once, but yeah, I’ve never been in an airplane either.” She paused long enough for Cameron to look at her and her to look back. “You haven’t been to Seafair, have you?”

 

“No.”

 

“It starts next week and they’ve got an airshow. You can’t ride any of the planes, but you get to see some in action.”

 

“Oh, no. Hold on. It’s time I asked you on a date, it’s only fair.” She smiled. “Would you like to come to Seafair with me?”

 

“Absolutely.”

 

“Great. So what is it, besides an airshow?”

 

Rita giggled, and eight days later Cameron learned Seafair was a month-long extravaganza that took over the whole city and was never the same two years in a row. It had races, marathons, a carnival, unhealthy food on plates and sticks and in wrappers and cups, a couple of parades, pirate ships, all sorts of street musicians and artists, and the chance to lose yourself and your date in the crowd. Fire jugglers weren’t as romantic as Ferris wheels, but more exciting to watch when the lines got long.

 

“The air show’s at the end of the month, over there.” Rita pointed when they stopped at the top of the wheel’s circuit. “You can get tickets for it all over the city, but you have to get there the day of for a good view.”

 

“What about from one of the hotels?”

 

“Even if you had a room, you’d miss out on all the sounds. It’s an essential part of the experience.”

 

“I guess I’ll find out.” The wheel hitched and started to move again, and they began heading down. They went over to get some ice cream and ate it slowly while they walked around, talking and pointing out the sights as they noticed them, just having fun, the whole time Cameron feeling more like herself than she had in a long time. It felt like going out to a carnival with her sister, or strolling through shops with friends in college – casual and good, and friendly, and at ease with the person she was with, not having to hide herself.

 

They had sex that night. It wasn’t nearly as fast as it’d been with Nancy, but that made sense: this wasn’t a fuck, this wasn’t screwing, this was sex, which was something completely different.

 

They’d just gotten inside Rita’s apartment, the door locked and the jackets hung up, and Cameron put her hand on Rita’s shoulder. She turned around to look up at her, and she looked down – still so strange to do that, even now – and just like in the movies, she tilted her chin up, leaned in, and gently kissed her. Soft, quiet, dry, just lips on lips to let her know. She pulled back, let Rita choose the next move – and that was moving up, kissing Cameron, kissing her hard and grabbing her hair and pulling her down and in and gasping when Cameron grabbed her hair too, which made her groan: she’d missed this texture, long shampooed hair between her fingers, she hadn’t felt it in ages. She groaned again, and kissed Rita deeper, just feeling what she had to give, before Rita let go of her hair to move down to her shirt, grabbing the bottom and tugging it off. Cameron took the message, stepping away to pull it off.

 

They both took off their shoes, then started undressing and heading to the bedroom at the same time. Rita took longer – shirt, petticoats, garters and hose and underwear – and by the time Cameron was in her underwear Rita was only unhooking her bra to stand there in nothing but her skirt.

 

She scrambled to think of something a man would say in this. ‘Brings out your tits’ wouldn’t do it, ‘you look great’ wouldn’t either, ‘I’m happy to be here’ – she grinned as hard as she could and said “You are fabulous.”

 

Rita giggled, blushed, and pulled out her bun, letting her hair tumble down and wave around as she shook her head. She unzipped and stepped out of her skirt. Cameron reciprocated and pulled off her underpants, let Rita push her back onto the bed and go back to kissing, running her hands up and down Rita’s back as her hands went to Cameron’s hair. Over the long curve of her back down to her rump, her ass, skimming over it to run back up into her hair, wide open-mouth kisses with the whole of her body against her own and so much and she missed being this close so much she couldn’t even remember. She whimpered and turned it into a groan and reached down between her legs.

 

“Here,” Rita whispered, “Let me,” and moved down to grab Cameron’s penis, still soft and not ready yet, and Cameron couldn’t hide her gasp as anything else. Her had was so much smaller than what she knew but she knew what she was doing from the outside and she’d never been touched like this by anyone else and she was getting hard faster than she thought she could. She wanted to grab Rita’s hands and squeeze them tight around her penis and keep them there and let her touch her all night but she wouldn’t get to do what she’d come here for, and did grab Rita’s hand and it was so small in her own and held it still and asked, “Do you have any condoms?”

 

Rita let go and flopped on Cameron’s stomach to reach over to a drawer and in some way that felt better than the masturbation, the way the kissing felt so good. She was back up in a moment, grinning at her handiwork, “Looks like he’s ready to play.”

 

“Oh, please,” Cameron squeezed her eyes closed, “please don’t separate it, I’m ready to play.”

 

She ripped the condom open, flicked the tip to test. “On top?”

 

“Nuh – no, no.” She smiled to make it genuine – she liked being on the bottom, looking up at someone into their face not because it was more intimate but because that’s how she’d learned to have sex and she liked it was used to it. Rita rolled the condom down and she gasped and arched again, and she whispered close in her ear that they had all night she didn’t need to come yet. And she kissed her again, holding her head in place her tiny hands on her cheeks and straddling over her chest.

 

She’d whispered, “You don’t need to come yet,” and kissed her and Cameron kissed her back and held on so gently like she might hurt her, she’d never tried holding anyone and she didn’t know what to do but it didn’t matter because Rita was grabbing her penis again and holding it right and she was inside of her and all she could do was pant and hold herself still. Rita went slow, and Cameron stayed still, and she wanted to thrust up but didn’t want to move because Rita had her hands over Cameron’s chest and this all felt so good – and suddenly she did, she didn’t know why, but she grabbed Rita’s hips and cried out and thrust right up and she heard Rita cry out too but didn’t care, it was warm and soft and all around right where it hurt to feel so good.

 

“Oh, fuck,” she whispered, “oh fuck, oh fuck.” She looked up at Rita: eyes open, big smile, ready and proud of herself and Cameron couldn’t blame her, not when she knew she could make her feel this way.

 

Rita began to move, soft little small movements back and forth rocking, and Cameron ground her heels into the bed and tried to follow her, moving with her wanting more of that of this of how close she was all inside. She did something, tightening herself, and Cameron jerked her head back, thrusting up harder than she had before, and Rita laughed again, a good laugh, and she did it again. She looked Cameron right in the eye and took her hand and moved it to her breast – and that – that was more of a distraction than anything. It felt like a breast. Cameron took it in her hand, feeling the weight and shape of it, not feeling anything for it in particular.

 

She caught her mistake, reaching up for Rita’s face and pulling her down into another kiss, holding her in close as she thrust up hard, hard, deep in that in her – moving to kiss her neck, take in the smell of long clean hair, wrap her arms around her and push her hips as hard as she could again and again and practically scream when the tight pressure outside herself shot through and all she could do was hold on to Rita as she came.

 

She slumped back against the bed, trying to get back to breathing normally. Rita was still around her, but now she didn’t want to move, she just wanted to be in her for a while longer, nothing else. But she knew Rita wanted something, so she nuzzled Rita’s face and moved down to that little spot she missed so much some days, rubbed it gently and nicely, and when Rita came she felt more jolts, more shots, lying so close on top of each other for a little while longer before Rita sat up, moved off, and grabbed and threw the condom away. She was back next to her a moment later, kissing again, running her hands over her chest, murmuring things she couldn’t quite hear. She was too tired.

 

“Come on.” That was spoken, that she could hear. “Let’s go to sleep.” Rita rolled over, tugged on her arm; Cameron took the cue and lay her arm over Rita’s side, pulled her in close. Too tired to care about anything but having someone this close, she felt herself drift off, still smiling.

 

-

 

The next morning, Cameron woke up on the other side of the bed with Rita still snoring quietly and an arm wedged under a pillow. She got up and showered as quietly as she could, put on the same clothes from yesterday, and got a ride back to her place after a very slow, very early lunch at a local sandwich place.

 

“Do you think they get a lot of people coming in here in – our situation?” Rita asked.

 

“This has probably happened a million times here. They’re open at nine on a Sunday.”

 

She already knew not working in the same department went a long way to keeping any weirdness out of the relationship, such as it was – this was, by all practical measures, her first real relationship in a long time. It was a relationship with morning-after sandwiches, with shared lunches outside of the hospital and afternoons on local walking trails in the parks with holding hands. She’d kiss Rita good-morning and good-bye, because that’s what a good boyfriend did; she waited for her with little gifts, tiny plants with painted frogs to put on desks and windowsills, because that was what good boyfriends did, too.

 

The reward was more than worth it. Not even the sex – yes, sex with a penis was fantastic, and she loved it to tears, literally tears the second time Rita planted her on the bed and held her there and rode her up and down. But at the same time, what she liked more than the orgasms was the before and after, the kissing and holding.

 

She couldn’t tell if it was the hormones her brain dumped out, something to do with the giddiness of being with someone for the first time in ages, or something else she’d somehow overlooked. It wasn’t something she tried to think about except when there was a problem. It was getting more frequent. A new relationship meant sex, and Rita liked it quite a bit, so that meant quite a bit of sex, but for Cameron, it was becoming harder and harder -  well, not to fake it, but to keep it up.

 

The third time they’d had sex it was fucking, over at her place for a change, Rita on top as she always was and as fantastic as it was Cameron suddenly realized, thumbing Rita’s nipples, she didn’t want to be doing this. She didn’t know what it was she didn’t want to be doing except this whole thing, and it was so full a feeling she stopped for a moment, freezing in place, not sure what to do next or where to go. Rita kept going, not noticing or hoping her moving would help, and Cameron got back into the groove a moment later, but didn’t get to sleep fast that night even though it was her bed this time.

 

The fourth time was the next morning, and even though Cameron couldn’t do much, claiming a headache, she made sure Rita enjoyed herself, a point of pride for herself. They had to rush to beat the morning traffic – and what a bitch it was that laughing over the disc jockey in the car was better than sticking her fingers up her cunny.

 

Five didn’t happen. They’d kissed and ground against each other just like normal, they’d fallen onto bed just like normal, and Cameron had reached down to jack herself just like normal – but what wasn’t normal was nothing happening. She groaned against Rita’s tits, their softness strange to her cheeks, trying to think how good it’d be to be buried up to her balls and shoot out inside her, but nothing, no response, just a limp cock she was holding almost as an afterthought that she didn’t even like to touch when she used it to piss.

 

“Oh, honey,” Rita murmured, reaching down to help, but even someone else’s hand on her didn’t do it, didn’t do anything, not even a buzz just an itch that wouldn’t get scratched. “Hmm,” she tried again, shifting her grip, tugging down and pulling up, and nothing was working. “Is something –”

 

Cameron burst into tears. Rita let go. She’d wanted that, even though she wasn’t supposed to, and she started to cry harder.

 

“I’m sorry,” she managed to get out.

 

“Al, look, it’s okay, I know it doesn’t always work. We can still have fun.”

 

“It’s not that.” She threw her arm over her face.

 

“Look, you’re tired, you’ve got a headache, you’re not ready, it doesn’t matter, you don’t – please stop crying.” Her hands were on her arm and she flinched away from them.

 

“It’s not that!”

 

“Is, what, is something wrong? Is there something I need to do?”

 

“No! It’s not, it’s not you, it’s not that, it’s, it’s me I’m sorry I’m sorry.” She hadn’t ever wanted this, it wasn’t anything like what she’d ever – this was wrong, this was what she’d been afraid of.

 

“What? What are you sorry for?”

 

She took a deep breath, and another, and ran her hands down her face but couldn’t stop crying. “I’m sorry. I shouldn’t be here.”

 

“Al, what –”

 

“It’s not Al. It’s Allison.”

 

“A – I’m sorry?”

 

“It’s Allison.” She took another deep breath, gulping in air, trying to get stable enough to talk. “Allison.” She looked up at Rita, knowing she was a fright – she’d hate her fucking guts but she needed to say it. “I’m – I’m not, I wasn’t born –”

 

“You’re an andro?” Rita tilted her head to the side, as though that’d help her see Cameron better. She nodded, mute. Rita nodded back, and Cameron didn’t know what that face meant, was afraid it meant something bad – and Rita just looked at her quietly, and then lay down next to her, gently, not touching. Cameron didn’t look at her and rolled on her side, and she felt Rita’s arm lie down over her chest.

 

“So your name’s Allison?”

 

“Yes,” she said quietly.

 

“It’s a good name.” From her tone, Cameron could tell she was picking her words carefully. “I’d like to use it, but if you want me to keep using Al, I understand.” They lay there for a while, and then she said, “Do you just want to lie here for a while?”

 

“Yeah,” still quiet.

 

“Okay. I’ll stay a bit, and then I’ll go put the water on, and I’ll be in the kitchen when you’re ready to come out.”

 

“Okay.”

 

“Okay.”

 

She felt the bed shift when Rita finally got up, and heard the kettle whistle and cut off sharply. When she finally shuffled into the kitchen after grabbing her pants and shirt, Rita had two mugs on the table, and she pushed one to Cameron, who took it as soon as she sat down. The tea was dark, smoky, and about room temperature.

 

Cameron took a sip more for courtesy than thirst. “Why aren’t you mad at me?”

 

“What?”

 

“Why aren’t you mad at me?” She said it with more force this time. “You fucked me when you didn’t know I’m an andro. You should be mad at me.”

 

“Why?”

 

“Because – because that’s what people do. They get mad if you don’t tell them and they’re angry you didn’t before.”

 

“Have you told other people?”

 

“No! Why would I?”

 

“I’m mad you didn’t tell me, but I don’t understand why you wouldn’t before.”

 

“Because of how we’re having this conversation. Because I know you’re going to look at me differently now that you know about me.”

 

“Why wouldn’t you just tell me?”

 

“Because!” She could feel herself crying again and didn’t try to stop it. “Because I hoped I wouldn’t have to, or need to.” She wiped her face and kept crying. “I’d hoped I could just go through and not need to tell anyone.”

 

“But wouldn’t it have been better for me to know?”

 

“No,” she shook her head, “Maybe. I just, I just thought I could be normal and not tell anyone.”

 

They sat there for a while, tea getting colder. Finally Rita said, “When did it happen?”

 

“Almost two years ago. More like eighteen months.” She couldn’t count down the precise number of days and weeks without stopping to add all the months, but she remembered the afternoon when she’d self-diagnosed something which wasn’t general hunger and strain from exercise and realized what was actually happening to her. If she stopped to think, she could pull back the exact sense of loss and horror and fear over what was happening to her. Puberty hadn’t come close. And she knew that Rita would go ahead and say something about how of course this was why she acted so weird sometimes, and why everything she did was wrong, and why she didn’t walk right or use the right tone of voice or any of a million things she just didn’t know, and took a large gulp of tea.

 

Rita stayed quiet, and finally said, “Why did you go out with me? Why try dating me?”

 

“Because dating women is what men do. I wanted to fit in.”

 

“So I was just a way for you to be normal?”

 

“No,” she shook her head. “I like you, I like being with you, even if I wasn’t a guy I’d still want to hang out with you. But now that I’m…”

 

“Now that you’re a man you want to have sex with me.”

 

“Well, no.”

 

“I’m sorry?”

 

“I like having sex, I just don’t really like it with…I can’t believe I’m having this conversation.”

 

“Yeah, I can’t really believe it either.”

 

“So what do we do now?”

 

“It’s nearly one, so I think we go back to bed. But I can take the couch.”

 

“Shouldn’t I get the couch?”

 

“You’re a guest. I’ll take the couch.”

 

It was too early in the relationship for pajamas and toothbrushes at each other’s place, so Cameron just slept in her underwear. She got up before Rita again, and showered as hard and hot as she could stand, scrubbing everywhere and everything twice over and then stood in the blast for a while after she was washed down. She tiptoed past Rita to the kitchen to wash out the forgotten mugs, started some oatmeal on the stove, and sat and waited for her to get up.

 

It didn’t take too long after that, Rita shuffling in with a bathrobe on once Cameron was halfway done with her bowl. She didn’t get a chance to say anything, Cameron cutting in, “I understand if you don’t want to speak to me again.”

 

“What?”

 

“I – you don’t?”

 

“Allison,” hearing her name didn’t feel weird, and on some level she wondered if that was weird, “It’s a lot to process. And I like you, but –”

 

“If you don’t want to fuck me, I understand.”

 

She nodded, cocking her hips and pointing a finger, “That, yeah. I’d rather not see the guy I’m about to sleep with start crying because he can’t get it up.”

 

Cameron smiled. “I think that’s just me.”

 

“I’ve had other guys get embarrassed, but nobody’s cried.” She made her way over to the oatmeal, lifted up the cover and sniffed.

 

“Were you able to guess anything?”

 

“No.” Cameron knew if they were looking at each other, they couldn’t have this conversation. Rita went on, spooning oatmeal into a bowl, “I mean, you’re a bit talkative for a guy, but you did a really good job.”

 

“Really?” She couldn’t stop her smile. “Thanks. I was trying to act the way men should act.”

 

Rita turned around, “You were doing a good job of pulling it off, but there were…just, these little moments.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“You were…I mean,” Her free hand spun like she was trying to spin the words out of the air. “You were acting like a man should act, but you weren’t acting like a man would act.”

 

“Oh.” She nodded. “Oh. Okay.”

 

She sat down with the oatmeal. “Do you know any guys you could talk to? Maybe it’d help.”

 

“I don’t know. I haven’t really hung out with any other men.”

 

“Maybe you should.”

 

“Maybe. Yeah.”

 

-

 

It wasn’t so strange to find ways to get to know the few other men in the hospital: consults were a fact of life, she knew most of the nurses from rounds, and sitting down with someone eating alone in the cafeteria wasn’t too unusual. The problem was that she’d been working here long enough that she knew it’d look a little weird for her to start making conversation now – that, and integrating herself into already well-established social circles took time.

 

She’d thought she’d learned how to talk to other men by talking to patients, but after three minutes of trying to talk to Conte about the weather, she realized she’d learned to talk to patients as a male doctor, not as a fellow member of the gender. She’d adapted most of her old doctor-patient and doctor-doctor speech patterns for those situations and none of them worked in something with someone on the same level. Here, now, it wouldn’t work for back-and-forth about the recent rainstorms, and neither would talking like a woman, so she took the coward’s way out and moved to another table to eat alone.

 

Telling someone she needed a tutor or asking for advice would be an admission, and she wanted that even less than she wanted the help, but there had to be some sort of compromise between coming out at work and staying hidden in her office.

 

She settled on calling Wilson. After the ‘it’s great to hear from you’ and ‘how are you doing’ small talk portions of the conversation, she explained why she was calling. He sat back in his chair and nodded. “It’s really not as complicated as you think it is. And no, there isn’t some secret guy club where you need to know the handshake – but there are some mannerisms you should look out for.”

 

“Like what?”

 

“In general, there’s a lot more emotion going on. It’s okay for someone to admit he’s unhappy about something to a group without having to be coy, and it’s very rude to interrupt. Men don’t speak over each other the way women do. Are you taking notes?”

 

“I am now.”

 

“Good. Also, I know it’s the hard part, but don’t try to ‘act casual.’ Everyone can tell, it doesn’t fool anybody, and it won’t do you any favors.”

 

“So what should I do instead?”

 

“Accept you’re going to screw up a conversation every now and then and move on with your life.” He gave a little snort of laughter. “Treat it like a diagnostics session and learn from your mistakes.”

 

“Analyze the situation within an inch of its life as cynically as I possibly can?”

 

“If it helps – how has work been, by the way?”

 

“Pretty good, actually. I just got a patient with Sjögren’s Syndrome.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Kanin didn’t believe me until she got the test results.”

 

“I don’t think House has gotten that one yet.”

 

“Should I call him to gloat?”

 

“I think an e-mail would be plenty.”

 

That turned out to be the case: four days later, she got a reply that consisted entirely of ‘_Congratulations. Now don’t bother me unless you’re naming something after me_,’ and she wasn’t the least bit surprised.

 

Wilson’s advice was spot-on, too. She knew all eleven men employed on her floor and a handful of the others scattered around the hospital. Talking to them turned out to be an easy matter of keeping her head up, walking slowly in the hallway, and giving a friendly, open, male smile as a greeting. After that, eating lunch with them in the cafeteria wasn’t so awkward, and she knew she could move on from there to friendly drinks after work, and maybe, if she did it right, some sort of outing. Building it up deliberately, a step at a time, might not be the way most people did things, but it didn’t come so naturally anymore, so it was all she could do.

 

Of course, just because she was doing something right didn’t mean other people recognized that. George Pressler’s blood work had just come back positive and she was five minutes away from a shouting match with Chalke.

 

“I’m not saying that,” she said for the third time. “Look, I’m not saying we should go in there with a ticker-tape parade and a dancing chorus line but we have an obligation –”

 

“No, we don’t. Not about what you think we do.” She came up to Cameron’s chin and didn’t think anything of having to look up to make eye contact or be less than six inches away to do it or put a finger in her face to make a literal point. “I don’t know where you’re coming from with this tripe on informed consent, coming in here with it, but we’re not here for his wife or the kids they’re going to have someday, we’re here for him. He doesn’t want us to tell her, we won’t tell her, he wants to tell her himself we’ll let him. You got that?”

 

There’d been too many times when telling other people got her a little bit of information that turned out to be the right bit to help cure them – or find the source of the African Sleeping Sickness – but she knew from how Chalke was looking at her, and how she knew she should act now, that if she said anything it wouldn’t end well.

 

“I said you got that?”

 

“I got it.”

 

That got her to move away, back off, look down at the file and update it with two taps. “Why did I even bother?”

 

Cameron knew the answer was because she was one of the best damn doctors in the hospital and her consult had helped find what was wrong with him, but there was no way she could talk back without enforcing the overwrought male stereotype she hated being pegged into. She didn’t cry in her office, but let herself wallow in the fact that there wasn’t anything she could do to make people look at her like she was herself.

 

Almost all. There were two short paragraphs near the end of her Little Blue Planet guide about the sort of people her mother sometimes euphemistically referred to as ‘the outdoors type’ and where someone should travel if they happened to fit into that group. Cameron supposed, by a very odd and bent look at things, she might well qualify as a member now.

 

The guide didn’t have any specific information on where to go, or what to see, but rather listed a couple of other guides and websites discreetly; she didn’t visit them at work, instead waiting to get home to check out the bar and hangout listings. There weren’t any within walking distance of her apartment, but there turned out to be a few clustered fairly close together a short bus ride away. They were also near some reasonably interesting shops, so she had some pretense to walk by and look at them from across the street in their off-hours, and come back when they were busy the next evening.

 

Even without going in, even just sitting across the street and knowing what went on in there – it didn’t matter if nobody knew about her going in. The admission of the implications, even to herself, was almost too big to deal with.

 

Two nights after that she managed to drag herself inside. On some level, she’d known she wouldn’t find debauchery dripping from the walls, but at the same time, the whole place was a very low-key affair, with men hanging out and drinking and talking quietly. She tugged her shirt down on reflex.

 

Oh, hell. Nobody here knew her, and she probably wouldn’t come back. She made her way over to the bar and ordered a stout. The bartender raised an eyebrow, but pulled a bottle out anyway. As she drank, grimacing over how cold it was, she looked around at the men in pairs and alone, noticing the way some of them kept just enough distance and some of them leaned in close to each other the way men usually did with women.

 

She didn’t know if any of her usual patterns of interaction applied in this type of situation. At this point, she’d already paid for her beer and could leave at any time. Knowing that helped, and she took another drink, tilting it correctly, and looked around again. There was someone else alone, looking at her, and when he caught her eye she smiled. He smiled back, got up, and moved to sit down next to her.

 

“Well, hello.”

 

“Hi.”

 

“I’m Miles.”

 

“Al.”

 

“Are you new here?”

 

“I’ve never been in here before, no.” She glanced at what looked like his Brandy Alexander. “Why?”

 

“You don’t look comfortable enough for it to be anything but your first time.” He smiled. “Is it everything you expected?”

 

She held her hand up flat, tilted it from side to side. “I was thinking it’d be something…um…”

 

“More burly? More outdoorsy?” She nodded, embarrassed. “We can’t all live up to Uncle Walt.”

 

She tried to get a handle on what he was getting on, tried to think of a way to smooth out the situation. “I’m not trying to. I’m just still not sure how…” she trailed off deliberately, looking down at her beer and then back at Miles, whose expression was now a lot more generous. He wasn’t a woman, and he didn’t think she was, and in any case the ways to pick up women wouldn’t work in this case. It’d been a long time since she’d tried to pick up a man and couldn’t remember everything, and didn’t want to risk doing something wrong. She might as well go for broke. “I’ve never done this before.”

 

“Oh.” He nodded.

 

“Am I that bad?”

 

He smiled. Good; she’d wanted to be funny. “Not that bad, but there’s plenty of room for improvement.”

 

She ordered both of them another drink and a basket of pretzels, which they ate slowly as they kept talking, joking, moving closer together until their thighs were pressed against each other on the long bench. It didn’t take long until he leaned in close to her ear and said, “I’ll be at the corner. Come out in ten minutes.”

 

“What?”

 

“The paddywagons don’t usually come around on Fridays, but it’s better to play it safe. It looks different if we don’t leave together.”

 

“Oh.”

 

He gulped down the last of his drink. “Ten minutes. Corner.” She watched him leave and waited twelve. True to his word, he was under the streetlamp, looking just like a character from a movie. They didn’t say anything when they walked to his car, got on, and drove off to his apartment, her sitting and looking out the passenger seat’s window at the streetlights flicking past. She didn’t look right at him until they finally got to his living room, when she stood right next to him and looked him in the eye and brought her hands up to his face and kissed him. He kissed her back, his own face tickling hers in the way she’d known for so many years of kissing men, but it felt different now, her own face must be tickling his too, her own face so wide and ragged in the mirror. If she let the alcohol work and let herself stand behind it she felt more like a woman than she had in ages being wanted by a man.

 

He held her head in his hands like she was holding his, and he kissed her so different from the women she’d kissed, different the way she liked not soft not letting her take charge but them being in charge together. She wrapped her arms around him and kept on kissing and she whimpered just a bit as he pulled away. She was getting hard between her legs, just a little bit but still plenty, and she wanted to leave it alone for more of the rest because she didn’t want it over so fast.

 

“Come on,” he panted. He let go, and so did she, following his lead and taking off clothes and shoes and making their way to his bedroom. She peeled off her shirt in the hallway and he looked at her like she was the most delicious thing he could imagine. And it didn’t make her want to hide, being looked at like that. He grinned, “Wouldn’t kill you to show that off.”

 

She grinned back, moved in close, pulled off her pants and stood naked for a moment, enjoying how he looked at her all the way up and down. He tossed his shirt aside and he was naked too, now, and she knew she was looking at him in the same way: she hadn’t seen a naked man outside of the shower in way too long and she loved how they looked and she wanted that right away. She felt just like herself in a good way, in the way she felt high in her chest whenever anyone looked at her like that no matter who they were and she pinned him down on the bed and licked her lips as she looked at his hard-on inches away. He made a sound as she wrapped her lips around it, swallowing the bits of liquid leaking out. Nobody talked much about this but it was something she took a lot of fun in, that she liked being able to do well. She knew it counted as sex just as much to someone ramming their cock into her cunny, and made sure to do it right.

 

It’d been a long time since she’d done this but she still remembered how to measure how much teeth by the way he grunted, how to use her tongue to slide around and use just the tip to tease around the head, work her throat down and pull her cheeks in –

 

“Whoa, wait, wait,” Miles grabbed her shoulder. She kept his cock in her mouth and looked up at him, but he pushed back and she moved away. “You’re – you’re good at that. I mean really good – I thought that was your first time today.”

 

“It was.” She smirked. “My first time in that bar, not my first time with a man.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“So can I get back to that?” She licked her lips for effect, to try to get him to say yes.

 

“I’d love to,” he moved to stroke her hair, “but I’m not seventeen, and if you keep doing that you won’t get any fun.”

 

“What – this is fun.”

 

“Fun for me, not fun for you. You know what I mean.”

 

She didn’t. She just looked at him and he smiled. “If you don’t want to, we could – ”

 

“No, let’s do it.” She didn’t want this over yet, didn’t want him to stop looking at her like this. “What, what did…”

 

He pulled her up, kissed her deep, “Fun for both of us.”

 

She relaxed into it, running her fingers over his broad shoulders, “Okay.”

 

“Good.” His hands were on her back, running up and down her spine, going down to cup her ass, going down to – to –

 

“Fuck!”

 

“That’s the idea,” he drawled, circling around, rubbing lightly.

 

“I – I didn’t, I don’t.”

 

He stopped kissing, looked her right in the eyes. “If you don’t want to, just say no and I’ll stop.”

 

She did and didn’t, she wanted to keep going with him stay in bed and hold each other she couldn’t do what he wanted she had to if she wanted to stay, “No. I mean, yes, let’s do it.”

 

“You sure? I mean, you –”

 

“Would you just fuck me?”

 

He blinked, shook his head sharply, “Okay.”

 

She wasn’t feeling drunk at all now, nothing fuzzy or soft around the edges, but she let herself sit back and let him take charge, kissing him hard. “This I haven’t done before.”

 

“You’ll be fine.” He moved out from under her and she watched him get a small tube of something out from the bedside table’s drawer, rubbing it between his hands, “Lie down and put your knees up.” She did, resting her forehead on her elbows, feeling a bit silly which was so out of place she almost didn’t know what to do about it except sit back in her head and try not to do anything.

 

His hands were on her and that was good until they got in her, the tip inside and she jerked away and he whispered, “It’s okay” and kissed her on the small of her back and he meant it but it wasn’t okay she didn’t have her cunny and he wasn’t going to go inside her that way and it wasn’t right for her this way. But she wanted his hands on her and she couldn’t say no now she knew that so she stayed quiet and still as he pressed his fingers inside.

 

It didn’t feel like anyone fingering her, and when she felt the bed shift and his hands on her that was almost good, almost with his weight on her back that she liked – and then he started to press inside her and she jerked again and hissed and it didn’t feel the way it should with something pressing inside. It didn’t it didn’t it shouldn’t she wanted to go but this wasn’t how it should go with her and a man, it wasn’t correct or right she should have his cock in her cunny where she was soft and open and ached for touch not where it hurt to press not a place she didn’t want something to be not like this at all.

 

But he was pressing down on her and whispering how good it felt, and she hissed, and that sounded like she liked it. She stayed as quiet as she could as he moved, thrusting in and out, his hips slapping against hers as he went faster and faster and it felt wrong and she felt so dirty and didn’t want to be here and when it was over and he’d stopped he lay on top of her and kissed her ear and whispered how good she was. He pulled out of her and that felt terrible too, and he pulled her so they were spooning, him up all close to her, and he held her close and kept whispering. She didn’t listen. She lay there for a while before she knew he was asleep, his arms around her.

 

She stayed like that, him holding her, for a while longer. Then she got up, gathered her clothes, went to the bathroom, and turned on the shower as hot as she could stand. She used his soap and scrubbed her face, her hands, her legs, between her legs, everywhere she could think of. After she got dressed and left a note on the fridge saying she had a good time, she let herself out. It wasn’t at all polite, but she didn’t want to be in there any more.

 

The cab driver tried chatting with her, but she kept staring out the window at the lights flicking past, and he stopped trying after a couple of blocks. When she got back to her apartment it was barely morning, with a couple of hours to go until dawn; she didn’t want to sleep, so she turned the TV on and started to work her way through another one of Farkas’ discs. As soon as it was light out, she threw on her sweats, laced up her shoes, and started running.

 

She wasn’t angry, she didn’t think she should be angry, this wasn’t something she did to be angry over – this was something she did wrong, something she thought she’d know but didn’t and that she should’ve seen coming. Her feet beat against the pavement, harder and faster, her whole body aching in ways she didn’t want to think about but reminded her of when she’d shifted with how much everything just hurt.

 

Rounding a corner, going down another block – she should’ve known better than to think it’d be good or it’d be right when nothing was right anymore, when nothing worked the way it should, of course it wouldn’t have been any different. It’d been good but it wouldn’t have stayed good and she should’ve known that because what she was now meant it couldn’t be good the way it was supposed to be good, all it could be was bad and wrong.

 

She got back home sweaty and aching, breathing hard. The next week, she did her best to stay as in-character as she could: she still accepted consultations and greeted everyone, but if she didn’t have to leave her office she stayed put, door closed. She wasn’t angry with herself or Miles – she knew she should have known better than to think it’d have been the same, or at least, she should’ve known to think things through, or she should’ve known to stop him and just ask for mutual blowjobs. Even a handjob. Even claiming some sort of disorder where she couldn’t get a hard-on without chemical assistance and all she wanted to do was give him a blowjob and cuddle. She’d known a couple of guys who would’ve been perfectly happy with that arrangement.

 

The worst part was that, aside from knowing she hadn’t been able to think through the situation as it’d happened, she really missed how Miles had looked at her, and she wanted to go right back before she’d gone down on him. That, and wanting Miles – anyone else with a penis – was just so incorrect. And there wasn’t anything she could do about it, except wait and hope it would go away. It’d be a long time before she felt up to dating, though, she knew that much.

 

At least being social was something she could still do, and she went ahead and accepted Farkas’ invitation for lunch in the cafeteria and dinner that Sunday at her neighborhood barbeque. It was apparently the season for them, and it didn’t surprise her that Rita hadn’t made her an offer.

 

“Don’t they have those where you grew up?”

 

Cameron shook her head, swallowed the last of her sandwich. “Sort of. We call them block parties.”

 

She shrugged. “Different names for the same thing.”

 

“I’ll find out when I get there.”

 

Maria was almost right: the running kids were the same, the small clusters of people were the same, the way the food was served was the same. The details of the thing were what made it different: Cameron hadn’t had fresh-grilled scallops at a casual end-of-summer get-together before and she had to admit the lime really made them pop, and she was used to these sorts of things in front yards and streets, not just inside large churchyards.

 

She got her plate piled it up with stuff fresh off the grill and from-home contributions and made her way over to the back fence to eat by herself. The shit thing was she could go ahead and weep openly at work because that’s what people expected her to do, but couldn’t because it wasn’t proper workplace behavior, so even though she had the freedom to go ahead and indulge her emotions, she knew that’d be such a bad career move it wasn’t worth anything but the fantasy.

 

Eventually, Maria tried to ask her how she was doing. Cameron told her she was doing pretty good, and managed to divert the conversation over to the food, letting a native to the coast marvel at someone’s fascination over fresh shellfish. She smiled in all the right places, let Maria do most of the talking, and drove home feeling full and empty at the same time.

 

-

 

Weather didn’t change so much by the coast, that much she’d learned. Sure, there were seasons, but nothing like winter’s first snowfall. Just gradual shifts, like more fog coming in and fewer sunny days, and more rain and less leaves on the trees. She still went out for runs early in the morning, with the lamps staying on later and making the streets look like something out of a children’s book or an art gallery.

 

She didn’t stop to watch anything change before her eyes, just closed them, and when she opened them again fall was almost gone and winter had pretty much arrived. That, at least, was like home.

 

When her mother called her up to talk it went pretty much the same way it always did, except this time about halfway through she reminded Cameron it was three weeks to Thanksgiving and if she wanted to make decent arrangements it was almost too late.

 

Cameron smiled without feeling it, and two and a half weeks later was on a train bound for Chicago. Packing for a ten-day vacation wasn’t the same as packing to move across the country, and she knew that she’d get home and realize she’d forgot to pack something she hadn’t thought she’d need. With any luck, she could borrow something from her dad.

 

She’d been dozing when she had that thought; as soon as it hit her, she jerked awake as suddenly as if she’d slid on a patch of ice.

 

Once she got to the city, getting home was easy enough. Her mother had put her foot down she’d pick her up, no need to spend extra money on renting a car or waiting another hour and a half for public transportation, and the old yellow car was waiting in the designated spot. Cameron hefted her bag into the trunk and sat down in the back seat.

 

“So how are you?”

 

It took most of her willpower not to laugh at her mother’s question. “Okay, I guess. I’ve got a couple articles coming out soon, so that’s good.”

 

“Really? Isn’t that something. You’ve been writing a lot of them lately, haven’t you?”

 

“I guess. I mean, it’s important for me to establish myself now that I’m not in a fellowship anymore.”

 

“Oh, I can see that.” A light flicked to red, stopping the car for a moment. “So how do you like Seattle?”

 

“I like it a lot.”

 

“Is that all?”

 

She sighed and let herself go on. “They really know how to work with fish out there. And it’s actually pretty affordable.”

 

“I should hope so. Being out next to the ocean and everything.” She turned onto the exit and the conversation drifted away from them. Her mother kept talking but Cameron didn’t say much of anything in response, letting her fill up the empty space between them.

 

Home was home, still the same two-story house on a quiet and well-kept street, a building she hadn’t seen for nearly two years. That the tree out front was bigger was the first thing she noticed, followed fast by how much smaller the house itself was. Lugging her suitcase up to her bedroom – cleaned out pretty severely right before she moved away for her internship – gave her a weird feeling of shaking all over on the inside, like everything hadn’t grown the way it was supposed to as she passed pictures on the walls. She opened up the door to a bed too small to fit her comfortably and her father’s sewing supplies scattered over her desk.

 

“He keeps saying he’ll clean them up,” her mom said from right behind her, carrying a pair of blankets she threw over the bed. “Now that you’re visiting, maybe he will.”

 

“I don’t mind,” she said. “I wasn’t planning on using it anyway.”

 

“Well, all right. He’s out right now, but he’ll be back in a couple of hours, and your sister’s bringing her family over for dinner –”

 

“I’m a grown-up, mom. I think I can keep myself occupied for an afternoon.” She smiled for emphasis, the soft smile she’d learned for this sort of turn of phrase.

 

It worked: her mother nodded, shrugged, and said, “All right” before going back downstairs.

 

This was the time having a rental car would’ve been helpful, because asking to borrow her mother’s car to get out of the suburbs to anything resembling non-residential housing took at least a half-hour on foot. Although the chance to be out of the house for at least an hour was one she took gladly and cheerfully, throwing on a coat and calling out she’d be back for dinner and she had her phone, slipping back to parent-child speech patterns she’d learned perfectly by the time she was ten.

 

Three blocks away she changed her mind, turned around, and headed for the park. It was closer, but took longer to walk through, and she wasn’t up for more social interaction just yet, even dealing with paying for a hot chocolate.

 

The park was pretty much empty, nobody out on the paths on a bike or in roller-skates or jogging with their dog, no kids climbing on the jungle gyms or throwing balls to each other. It felt weird until she reminded herself it was a school day in a season when most people were inside at this time of day. It wasn’t that cold a year by Chicago standards – more wind than anything else, but no snow yet – but after several years away from it, she’d forgotten most of the details, and buried her hands deep in her pockets and wished she’d brought a hat.

 

She’d played here with Sam all the time when they were kids, riding their bikes out here and then chasing each other on the long stretches of grass, making up little war games and planning cities to lead and turning the hollows into oceans and the play structures into pirate ships. She tried climbing up on one, and wasn’t all that surprised to find she could pull herself up to the top without much effort. Blame the testicles for the upper-body strength.

 

It wasn’t that much higher up, but it was enough to see out to the pond, the little bits of grass beyond that, and a little ways over the surrounding neighborhoods. She stood up, balancing as best she could, shaking before she got her gravity settled out, shielding her eyes from the late afternoon sun. There wasn’t a speck of color to be found anywhere, just grays and browns and tans, all with the giant blue sky overhead. Looking up, down, and around – there were geese on the pond, resting before heading down south, and there were some people biking at the edge of the park, bundled up in shocking red, and there were some people trying to stoke a fire in their fireplace a few blocks west with the wind blowing east, and there wasn’t an easy way to get down, but she managed it without having to jump all the way to the ground.

 

When she got back to the house Sam’s family car was already in the driveway, and her nephew ran to her as soon as she got in the door. “Uncle Allison!”

 

“Morgan!” She crouched down, reached out, grabbed him in a big hug, almost tempted to hoist him up in the air but didn’t know how he’d feel about her doing something she’d never done before.

 

“Hey, Allie.” Cameron looked up from her nephew to her sister’s own smile. She stood up and got a hug from her, too.

 

“Hey, sweetie, could you go see if your grandpa wants some help in the kitchen?” He nodded, and as soon as he was off, Sam went back to her sister. “So how’ve you been?”

 

“Not that bad, really. Now, don’t lie to me, I’ll know, how are Mom and Dad?”

 

“Dad’s trying out new hobbies all the time, but I think quilting’s gonna stick. Mom’s got her writer’s group and that keeps her busy, and she still volunteers at the law library downtown a couple of times a week.” She snorted. “She’s been making bad jokes about knowing where everything is because she already used it ten years ago.”

 

“That’s Mom, all right.”

 

“They’re thinking about getting a dog.”

 

“And if that’s not a warning, nothing is.” She sat in a chair while Sam flopped down on the couch. The room was pretty much the same. The books on the shelves were a little different, but they were still shelves of books, and there were more pictures of Morgan on top of the fireplace and more art on the walls: still the same den her parents used to keep company busy until dinner. “So, really, how are you?”

 

“Work’s been killing me lately. Our bread guy’s been more of a diva than usual, and the manager’s been pressuring me to come up with something with raspberries because they’re the ‘in’ fruit right now even though that’s the pastry chef’s job. We finally got that huge walk-in freezer but now I’ve got to figure out how to get sheep heart on the menu because, now that we’ve got the space for it, we’re buying the animals whole.”

 

“Do you have a butcher in the kitchen now?”

 

“Not yet. But if I can get Sasha on my side, we’ve got a shot at getting Annie to open something up.” She twisted around, moving to lie on her left side. “Paul’s been a rock, I swear. Morgan’s fussing in school more but we’re pretty sure it’s just a phase.”

 

Cameron nodded for her to go on, and Sam practically lit up as she kept talking about her son, how he was doing in maths and reading and making so many friends, and how he was more than happy to be like his mom and help out at a bake sale.

 

“People hear ‘work in a kitchen’ and they think you can do everything.”

 

“I’m still not sure if making Laura make something would be cheating or not.”

 

“If it’s for a good cause it works out in the end.”

 

“Is that what House told you when you had to break into that guy’s house?”

 

“Which one?” They both got a good laugh out of that. He must’ve been drawn by the sound because that was when Paul came into the room.

 

“Hey, Allison.” He paused, drew his face in, “It is still Allison, right?”

 

“Still Allison.”

 

“You’re looking good.” His body language was stiff, a bit tense; she got up to hug him, showing him she still considered him close enough for such a public intimate act. When he sat down next to his wife he looked a lot more relaxed.

 

“I assume Sam’s been talking about her freezer.” She rolled her eyes and slapped him lightly. “And I know you don’t want to repeat yourself over dinner, so – Morgan’s got the rest of the week off from school, and he’d love to have you hang out with us, just the guys.” Cameron nodded, keeping her face calm. “So you free tomorrow?”

 

“All I’ve got planned is Thanksgiving dinner and going back to Seattle next week.”

 

“We’ll just pick you up tomorrow, then.”

 

“Won’t you be coming with us?”

 

Sam shook her head. “Not tomorrow, but the place can manage without me for two days.” She smiled at Paul. “Even on Thanksgiving.”

 

“I’d swear it’s a polyandrous marriage but that’s not legal in Illinois.”

 

Cameron smiled as Sam laughed, and they started to plan out which museums and galleries to visit until it was time for dinner, her dad summoning everyone into the dining room with the nice plates and silverware set out. As usual, Cameron kept her hands to herself when everyone else held theirs to say grace.

 

“My daughter the chef,” he laughed when Sam commented on his using Californian bay leaves. “A man should take pride in feeding his family, and she just offers critique.”

 

Morgan was practically bouncing up and down in his seat; his mother smiled, kept to her word, and let him take over and talk about school for himself. Cameron couldn’t stop herself from laughing at Morgan, as much from the anecdotes as the way he kept jumping back and forth to make sure he’d said everything important to his story about the classroom toad’s escape and his final capture by the teacher’s bucket.

 

“Well, I’m glad he came out of it okay.”

 

“It was my turn to feed him last week. The teacher let me hold the pinkie mouse out in front of him, and he went right and grabbed it!” Morgan mimed the toad’s capture of the mouse, his left hand staying frozen in the air and his right dashing out to hit it.

 

“Oh, my,” his grandmother said, “That sounds like a lot of responsibility.”

 

“We all get a chance. It’s in number order so nobody gets picked instead of someone else.”

 

“So, Allison,” her dad said, “how’s work been?”

 

Cameron smiled as best she could. “It’s not as exciting as my fellowship was, but it’s been pretty nice. The hospital’s good, and the cafeteria’s actually really great.” She shrugged. “I think that’s from being so close to the ocean; they can get all the good stuff right away.”

 

Sam nodded. “I had to fight against importing tomatoes.”

 

Paul held up a hand. “Don’t get her started. So what’s the weirdest thing you’ve gotten yet?”

 

That took a moment; ‘weird’ didn’t mean as much as it used to. “Someone came in with systemic sclerosis a few days ago.”

 

“What’s that?”

 

“It’s where blood vessels harden and break, basically.” She managed to keep from smiling over their reactions, all the adults drawing back and Morgan staring fascinated. “Autoimmune diseases aren’t pretty.” She did her best to look innocent. After all, she had had that case a few months back, so she wasn’t lying about it. Her ploy worked: nothing else talked about at the table involved her job or personal life, moving over to Sam’s for the time being. Having to wait a couple of hours for her sister and her family to go home, leaving her at the mercy of her parents, was still enough of a respite, and more than enough time to put on the act of being tired from all the travel and let her go to bed early without too much conversation.

 

She didn’t go to bed right away, or even got ready for it, but waited for her parents to head to bed themselves before slipping out of her room and back downstairs. Being careful not to walk where it’d creak and make as little noise as possible was tricky, and she tried to put as little weight on the floor, walking on tiptoe across bare floor until she got to carpet. She knew she shouldn’t be this nervous, lurking around in her childhood home after dark, but it was a feeling she couldn’t shake. Like she almost should be afraid someone might catch her here – not that she knew what they’d do, just that they’d catch her looking at Morgan’s art hanging on the fridge or out at the lawn through the kitchen windows or just sitting in the den looking around at the dark. A car drove by, lighting everything up, and that finally got her to get up and head to bed.

 

She was right; she didn’t fit the bed anymore, couldn’t stretch her legs out all the way and keep them under the covers, even if she moved to a diagonal position. Curling up, pulling the blankets in closer, she tried to settle down to get to sleep. She kept thinking of when Sam told her about how she and Paul sat Morgan down to explain why he needed to call his aunt his uncle now, and his face when she called them for the first time after she was done shifting, and where they’d all be going tomorrow. Rolling onto her right side, then her left, then onto her stomach and wriggling her arms under the pillow, she tried to get her mind to stop spinning around and settle down.

 

When she opened her eyes the next morning it took her a moment to realize where she was, and when she did she curled in on herself under the covers, shivering before throwing them off. She’d packed her electric razor and it whirred to life over the bathroom sink, clearing its way over her face. Shaving her face had, at this point, gotten to be just one more thing to adjust to, like figuring out how to ask a question. At least it was something she didn’t need to do in public. And she did feel better when she was done: a smooth face was something she was used to.

 

Her dad was already cooking up oatmeal when she came downstairs. “Morning.”

 

“Good morning.”

 

“It’ll be ready in a few minutes.”

 

“Okay.” She sat down at the table, pulling the paper over and scanning over the headlines without reading them.

 

“So where are you all going today?”

 

“The Art Institute, I think. They’ll be by to pick me up in a couple of hours.”

 

He sat down across from her, eyes flicking around before settling on her hands resting on the domestic news section. “I’ll get the sewing stuff out of your room tonight.”

 

“It’s okay. I’m only here for a few days anyway.”

 

“All right, then. Listen, I’m going grocery shopping for the dinner today, so if there’s anything you’d like –”

 

“It’s fine.”

 

“Well, I could get something for tonight.”

 

“Sam’s going to want me over for dinner.”

 

“Of course she is.” He sighed. His expression was tiny, just his eyes flicking and his mouth thinning, but years of watching patients lie to her to hide what was wrong with them let her see it before it left fast. “I was just thinking, I know we weren’t around much when you were growing up and it’s so rare for you to be home now, and since the last time you were here – I was just hoping –”

 

“Dad, if you want to do something with me,” she measured out her words deliberately, carefully, “you could pick someplace to go tomorrow, some other museum, and we could go do something together.”

 

“A day out just us guys?”

 

She felt her teeth clench. “If that’s what you want to do, we can do that.”

 

-

 

The Institute was as fantastic as it always was. Morgan played tour guide to Cameron, making up stuff as he went along; Paul and Sam took them to the temporary exhibit on European tapestries and their old favorites from when they’d all come here as kids native to the city or young adults relocating their lives. At the park afterwards, there was a rough-and-tumble game of tag, and Cameron got swept up in the moment and hoisted Morgan off his feet into the air, and did it again to hear him make that laugh and because she realized it didn’t really take any effort at all. Sam did have to run back to the restaurant for what turned out to be a not-uncommon soup emergency, leading to more than a little grousing over how difficult it was to get someone who knew how to work with carrots.

 

Two days before Thanksgiving meant there were still a lot of places open, more than enough to give her dad plenty of options. He settled on the MSI, which was good, because if they were looking over exhibits together they wouldn’t be talking too much. She was glad to be out with her father for a few hours – really glad, he was right she didn’t get home too much anymore and flat-out liked being with her dad – but at the same time, the idea of getting the energy to have a long, thoughtful conversation with him wasn’t something she felt she could do. Even if the conversation was about pendulums or hometown nostalgia and not her personal life, which he didn’t touch on after lunch. She’d just shrugged, said she’d dated a woman for a few weeks a couple of months ago, and that was that.

 

He waited to bring it up at dinner.

 

“Really.” Her mother leaned in. “What’s her name?”

 

“Rita.”

 

“Why aren’t you still dating?”

 

In this sort of situation, just like learning a girl thought she’d fucked her boyfriend into the hospital, the best thing to do was be totally honest. “Well, I didn’t come out to her until after we’d started dating, and she didn’t want to stay together after that.”

 

“That’s such a shame.” She shook her head. “People should be more forward-thinking these days.”

 

“It was her choice, Mom. If I made her uncomfortable…”

 

“Then shouldn’t it be her fault?”

 

It really wasn’t, but, “If I made her uncomfortable, why would I want to keep dating her?” She left the words hanging as she went back to her lasagna.

 

The day before Thanksgiving had her dad running around doing all the prep work he possibly could, her mom helping on one of the few days a year she went into a kitchen, Sam busy in the restaurant, and Paul and Morgan taking her out for lunch just to get out of the house for a while.

 

She’d forgotten how much fun food like this could be, and wiped some sauce off her face. Paul smiled. “Beats clams, doesn’t it?”

 

“Seattle –” she gulped down some water. “Seattle knows its teriyaki, but it just cannot do decent sandwiches.”

 

“Finger foods are so American, aren’t they.”

 

“God, this is good.” She took another bite. “I mean, I grew up on this stuff. They’re probably still using the same sauce.”

 

“If this place has been here since the sixties, probably.”

 

All too soon, the sandwich was gone. She almost wanted to order another one, but Morgan insisted they go do something else, so they went back to the park near her house after a brief stop at Sam’s house to get some old bread.

 

“Don’t get too close, they bite,” Paul warned as he ripped up slices.

 

“I won’t,” Morgan promised, and ran off to the pond.

 

“Warm year,” Cameron said.

 

“Not really. Just dryer than usual.” He turned his collar up and hunched his shoulders in.

 

She’d always liked him. He was good for Sam, good to Sam, always ready to be a good husband and put himself second for his wife and child. “Will he ever get a brother or sister?”

 

He shrugged. “I’d like him to get one of each, really. Sam’s a little harder to convince – I mean, she’s the one who’s got to have them.”

 

“You’d make some great kids.”

 

“I know.” Morgan was keeping his word, throwing pieces of bread at the geese from a good distance away. “I talk to her about learning to take turns and share, but, well, she’s always busy, and even me as a stay-at-home dad it’d still be a long time away from work.”

 

“Just a few months.”

 

“I keep telling her that.” He glanced over at her. “Do you want kids?”

 

She watched him run at the geese, scattering them honking into the air. “A long time ago.”

 

This year’s Thanksgiving Day was a much lower-key affair than other years, just close family, a total of fourteen people with Dad’s sister and her family from Decatur plus Mom’s cousins from across the city. By eleven everyone had their usual places in the house: the women in the living room watching television, the men in the kitchen under Dad’s administration.

 

Cameron hung around, flitting back and forth. Her mother invited her to watch the game, but she declined. “I’m not in the mood for lacrosse.”

 

“Come on, it’s lacrosse! It’s the national sport!”

 

“I just don’t want to watch it.”

 

Sam cut in, “We could grab our old sticks, throw the ball around the backyard – Mom, do we still have them?”

 

“It’s okay,” Cameron insisted. “I’ll help Dad in the kitchen.”

 

That didn’t work, either: everyone was already bustling around, chopping sausages and stirring broth and mixing sauce and tasting the parsnips for just enough white pepper.

 

Morgan, Alex, and Andy were running back and forth from the front yard to the back yard, all of them chasing each other at the same time, and Cameron knew anyone tall wouldn’t be allowed to join. She watched them from the front room for a while, back in the chair, until Sam came in. “Hi.”

 

She didn’t sit down. “Why aren’t you doing something?”

 

She didn’t look over at her. “There’s really not much to do.”

 

“You could just sit and watch the game with us.”

 

“I’m fine.”

 

“Bullshit.”

 

That got her attention, whipping her head around. “What?”

 

“Bullshit you’re fine. What’s wrong with you?”

 

“Nothing’s wrong.”

 

“Bullshit. I asked, what’s wrong with you? What’s going on? You’ve been upset and angry at everyone and you keep sulking and snapping at us – jeez, what’s wrong?” She was stanging back, holding her ground, using her voice as a lash.

 

“What’s wrong.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“You really want to know what’s wrong.”

 

“Yes!”

 

“Okay,” She stood up, walked over, staring down at her sister, glaring as hard as she could, “But first I’d like to know why you think you need to ask.”

 

“Come on –”

 

“No, you, you don’t get it, you think this can just happen to someone and it’s easy and fun and there’s no trouble adjusting but it’s fucking hard and I hate it and I have no idea how to talk to anyone and you think you can ask me what’s wrong now and if you do then you don’t get it.”

 

Sam just stood there, still looking up to keep eye contact. “What don’t I get?”

 

“You think you can just ask what’s wrong with me. It doesn’t work that way.”

 

“Jesus,” She whispered. “Allison, it’s supposed to work that way, but you’ve never, ever asked anyone for help even once, even when you’re supposed to –”

 

“‘Supposed to?’ What is this, Napoleon’s Germany? There aren’t rules for this anymore, and if I wanted to go through it on my own that’s my own choice.”

 

“You always do this. You always do it on your own and you never ask anyone for help.”

 

“It’s kind of hard to help when you’re growing a penis.” Sam took a step back, actually took a step back. “I could piss just fine because my urinary track still had an opening, but for about a week I didn’t have anything but this little lump.”

 

“Allison –”

 

Cameron matched her, taking a step forward. “I couldn’t chew for two weeks because my jaw was growing bigger and a new set of teeth was coming in. I could feel my heart getting bigger, my uterus sort of dissolved, my –”

 

“That’s enough!”

 

“It’s what happens when you shift so late! Why do you think I didn’t talk to you while it was happening? I waited for it to be over so it’d be okay to talk to you.”

 

Crossing her arms over her chest, she looked away and back. “Why wouldn’t it have been okay to talk to me? I’m your fucking sister.”

 

“Because it wasn’t the right thing to do. You didn’t need to see any of it.”

 

“Fuck that! I did!”

 

“You what?” It was her turn to take a step back.

 

Sam didn’t move forward. “I needed to see it! You’re always there for me and when you need it you never let me be there for you, you fucking know that.”

 

“What is this?” She pointed back to the living room, fuck it and let them listen, “I come home for Thanksgiving and suddenly everyone’s taking the time to reach out to me? You, Dad, are you all in cahoots with each other? Is Mom going to ask me to go dancing with her or something?”

 

“You come home for the first time in years after you, yeah, after you grew a fucking penis and call us once every six months, yeah, we’re worried you’re okay.”

 

“So why not call me?” She was too angry to yell. “Why not call me?”

 

“You wouldn’t have said anything.”

 

“I –” She couldn’t believe what she was hearing. “I’m going to my room.”

 

She stomped up the stairs, not noticing if anyone was watching or looking, took them two at a time, slammed the door behind her, curled up by her bed and folded her arms and started to cry. She didn’t want – she didn’t know what she wanted now, but she didn’t want this feeling, practically anything but this one.

 

Cameron kept crying, wiping her face off and trying to stay quiet and not sob too much. She didn’t know if this was a male thing to do or a female thing to do – men could let themselves cry, but every woman knew privacy let her get away with this sort of thing.

 

Her hands were shaking from all the adrenalin; she watched them in a way she usually didn’t, watched them shake, trying to figure out how they were a part of her body when they didn’t look like her hands, her real hands. She clenched them into fists, ran them over her legs up and down up and down and kept crying.

 

When there was a knock on the door she didn’t get up or call out; when there was another she stayed quiet. After the third, someone opened her door, came over and sat next to her, and it turned out to be Sam.

 

“What is it?”

 

“I’m sorry.”

 

“What?”

 

“I’m sorry.” She fidgeted for a moment, not looking Cameron in the face. “I shouldn’t…I should have thought how hard it is for you, with all this, but I want to be there for you, and you never let me.”

 

“Sam, if I – it doesn’t work that way for me anymore. I’m not allowed, the way it works is that I can’t ask, because if I do, even if nobody knows about it, then I’ll know I haven’t managed to succeed on my own.” She looked her sister in the eye. “And that’s even more important now. It’s, there’s all these expectations that I know I need to reach, and I can’t get help because that’s now how it works.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“If you want to help – you remember the sunlamps?”

 

“Yeah. I sent them as soon as I got your address.”

 

“Those helped, and they were help you knew I needed, but I didn’t ask for them.”

 

“What’s that mean?”

 

“If you know I need help, don’t paddle around, just come and help.”

 

“Allie,” she reached out, put her hand on her knee, “I won’t tell anyone if you ask.”

 

“I’ve never asked.”

 

“I know.”

 

“And you think I’m going to start now because I’m a boy?”

 

“I think you’re going to start because that’s what I need you to do.” She rubbed Cameron’s knee, slapped it, and left her hand there – letting Cameron cover it with her own and hold it there, just for a while – before slipping off and jumping up. “Hold on.” She was back a couple of minutes later with an envelope in her hand. “I wanted to give this to you.”

 

It wasn’t too big, and Cameron unfolded it easily. It was a photograph, and when she turned it over she gasped. She looked up at Sam standing over her, “Where did you get this?”

 

Sam shrugged. “Cleaned out my desk a few weeks ago. Thought you’d like it.”

 

She looked back at the picture. In it, she was sitting on the steps of a back porch, holding one arm and sort of smiling, hair up in a ponytail. It must be from her last summer vacation right after senior year of high school – god, she looked so young.

 

“Remember when I took that?” Sam sat back down. “You had Nick and Leah over and didn’t want your skuzzy kid sister hanging around.”

 

“I remember.” She shook her head, traced her thumb over the hair blowing in the breeze. “And we let you hang around anyway.”

 

“And you didn’t even yell at me when I kept taking pictures.”

 

“You were convinced you’d grow up to be the next Dorothea Lange.”

 

“You were convinced you’d grow up and get something named after you.”

 

“Hey, I still might get there. You’re too busy with your restaurant.”

 

“The Dorothea Lange of food photography.” Sam swept her hands through the air like she was tracking a marquee. It was such an absurd image, and she said it so seriously, that all she could do in response was let out a laugh. Just a small one, but a laugh. “Do you have any idea how hard it is to take a good picture of food? Don’t even get me started on drinks.”

 

“What about drinks?”

 

“You cheat!” Sam pushed her light on the shoulder, and Cameron rocked back, laughing a little bit more. Sam went downstairs first, and when Cameron finally followed her, there were still a few minutes to the game. Sam was in her old seat, most of the men had wandered in, and Cameron made her way out to the back. The kids were playing in the front yard so she had the porch to herself, everyone leaving her alone to watch the clouds move slowly and try to think and ponder without doing it deliberately. She broke out smiling when she realized how useful it’d be to get some sort of juggling balls to give herself something to do.

 

The dinner was a smashing success, everyone chatting, joking, eating, passing around more food than they could possibly eat in one night. Cameron stayed quiet, eating carefully so she wouldn’t spill anything, keeping out of the conversation and just watching everyone. It really wasn’t a bad way to spend Thanksgiving. She stayed quiet through dessert, as she helped clear the table, and all the way to bedtime, only saying enough to say good night as she needed to.

 

She had more to say the next day, when Mom and Dad took her out to the movies, and the day after that, when they took her to Sam’s restaurant for dinner. By now, she knew the difference between feeling better and being better – years of medical education and personal experience – but she also knew how important they were to each other, and if one came, the other was a pretty safe bet it’d follow.

 

-

 

Cameron knew she wouldn’t be doing this if she’d stayed in Princeton. She probably wouldn’t be doing this if she’d stayed on the East Coast or settled anywhere near Chicago. Being out this far West gave her permission to do this.

 

She walked into the hotel and stopped at the front desk, suddenly not sure what to do next. After a moment, the clerk turned to look at her. “Can I help you?”

 

“Uh, yes, um, I’m here for the convention?”

 

If saying its name fazed him, he didn’t give it away. “Right through the atrium, the first doors in the back on the left.”

 

“Thank you.” Right past the fountain, she looked at the brochure she’d printed out and read dozens of times already. Right now there weren’t any panels or discussions, just a meet and greet, and there was the little table with name badges for registration and she could leave right now if she wanted.

 

She could feel the blood rushing to her cheeks even though she didn’t have a reason to be embarrassed about being here. Deep down there was still some fear about getting caught, and by coming to this she was leaving herself open to everything.

 

She walked up to the little table. “Hi.”

 

The young man’s badge said his – her name was Claire_._ “Hi, are you here for the convention?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Okay, we’ll need your attendance fee.” Cameron handed over the cash; she counted it out and put it away, then turned back to her. “What would you like on your nametag?”

 

“Allison. Two Ls.”

 

“Okay, one moment.” One whirring portable print job later and she was fully registered as a guest, and a few moments of quiet panic and she was through the door. She hadn’t tried to imagine anything, knowing it wouldn’t be what she’d expect, but it was still surprising, mostly in how ordinary it all looked. Fifty, maybe sixty men from their teens to their seventies and all races and walks of life just hanging around the room and chatting, getting drinks and snacks from a little buffet table in the back, and it could’ve been a bunch of zookeepers or accountants for how regular it all was. She’d definitely overdressed.

 

Even from here, the buffet table looked pretty tempting, and when she got the courage to walk across the room she loaded up a small plate with cheese cubes and a few out-of-season berries. She scanned the room, saw a table without any plates or cups, and went over to put her food down before going back to get some tea. A few minutes after she sat down with that, someone sat down next to her, also somewhat overdressed. His nametag said she should call him _NICK._ “Hi.”

 

“Hi.”

 

“It’s good to see you here.”

 

“Do I know you?”

 

“I’m the Nick from the contact page.”

 

“Oh! Sorry. It’s good to meet you. In person, I mean.”

 

He smiled. “I understand. A lot of us didn’t meet in person until we set this up.”

 

“Really?”

 

“Yeah. Someone knew someone else, who knew this other guy who had a sister, and it kept going like that until Tim suggested we all get together somewhere.” He looked around the room. “It’s a step up from six of us in a restaurant booth.”

 

“How long ago was that?”

 

“Eight years,” he said after a pause that Cameron knew he didn’t need to figure out how long it’d been. “It keeps getting bigger. There’s a bunch of people from Portland that might make it next time.”

 

“Wow.”

 

“The more people that hear about it, the more know to come. So how’d you find out about this? You didn’t tell me before.”

 

“Just – poking around the Internet, I guess.” He waited, she shrugged, “You’re looking for one thing, and then you get a link to another page for something else, and then suddenly I’m at the homepage for this convention.”

 

“Well, I’m glad you found us. You live in the city, right?”

 

“Yeah, in Wallingford.”

 

“Cool. Some people are staying in the hotel, and you didn’t pre-register, so I just wanted to check.”

 

“Do you know everyone here tonight?”

 

“I do now.” It was an utterly cheesy line, but his smile was real. She knew just what he was doing, trying to make her comfortable with this sort of relaxing conversation, and right now – even though she wasn’t sure about how it worked into the meet-and-greet idea – she was glad she didn’t have to pretend or pay attention to how she held herself, and she was glad she was sitting down when she realized that because she felt her knees go soft.

 

After covering what they did to earn a living, how long they’d each lived in the city, which neighborhoods, and how boorish the tourists could get in summer, Nick leaned in. “Anyway, I’m leading a couple of the panels tomorrow, the ones on teenage shifting and media presence. They’re both before lunch, so – you will be here tomorrow, right?”

 

“How does this work?”

 

“There’s six panels before lunch and eight after, and we’ve booked the conference rooms on the ground level so we’ve got them to ourselves. You just go to a room, sit down, listen, and if you want to say something, you can go ahead.” She nodded and he went on, “I know there’s one on workplace politics after lunch, I think Vincent’s got that – it sounds like something you’d be interested in.”

 

“Is lunch in the hotel?”

 

“We usually go to local places. There’s this one café near here – you wouldn’t believe their pesto. It’s like they put drugs in it.”

 

“Really.” She smiled. “Sounds good.”

 

“Here you are!” They both turned to look at someone named Gary who clapped Nick on the shoulder. “Misha and I’ve been looking for you. Oh, hello.”

 

“Hi.”

 

He gave a little wave.“Gary, good to meet you.”

 

She nodded slightly, respectfully. “Allison.”

 

“Anyway, it’s that there’s a problem with the front desk people, and you should probably –” Nick nodded, held up a hand.

 

“Gotcha.” He looked at Cameron and shook his head. “It never goes smoothly. You just have to sort out the problems as people have them. I’ll be back in a bit.”

 

Gary sat down next to his vacated seat. “So is this your first convention?”

 

“It shows, doesn’t it?”

 

He just shrugged. “Nothing to be ashamed of. Trust me, it’s – I know how coming here can be a big step.”

 

“So how many…”

 

“This is my fifth.”

 

She leaned in, resting her arm on the table, “How’d you hear about this?”

 

“A while after I moved here, I met someone who already knew Tim,” he pointed to someone on the far side of the room, “who got me in touch with him when I told her about me.”

 

A couple of minutes later, Misha stopped by, and a few after that, Nick came back. As it turned out, there’d been a mix-up over which conference rooms were for them and which were for the other convention this weekend because big hotels meant group rates and the potential for this sort of problem. They kept talking casually until her stomach muttered at her; cheese and berries were tasty but didn’t make up a full dinner, and there were still some little sandwiches at the buffet. When she filled her plate up and went back to the table, someone else had joined the conversation.

 

She blinked, shook her head, did a double-take and stared to make sure it was who she thought it was.

 

“Oh, Allison!” Nick waved for her to sit down. “Matt, this is Allison, Allison, this is Matt.”

 

“Good to meet you.”

 

She nodded, swallowed,and said, “You too,” trying to cut back on the urge to smile – he really did look great in person, even without make-up. She’d cleaned up puke and shit from some genuinely important people – then she reminded herself he pretended to be other people for a living and to calm down because he wasn’t doing what made him famous to begin with. Here he was just someone else. She couldn’t stop herself smiling at that. “Can I ask – are you staying at the hotel?”

 

“Yes, I am.”

 

“You’re not here as ‘Mister Damon’, right? I mean, in the hotel.”

 

“No.” He looked pleased with the question. “I usually just get a name out of a phone book for something like this. It helps keeps the tabloids away.”

 

A little after that, Misha brought up TV shows and when she mentioned she’d just finished watching _Brimstone_, Matt spun around to her with bright interest; as it turned out, he’d been a fan of the show and wanted to get a part on there before it ended but didn’t get the chance. When Nick got up to get another cup of tea, she followed a moment later and caught up with him at the last remnants of the buffet.

 

“I, I’m just curious, how long has he –”

 

“It’s his third.” Nick blew over the lid of the cup, not looking at her. “And if it makes you feel any better, he’s still nervous about coming here.”

 

“Yeah. Yeah, he’d have to be.” She looked back at him, the idea of such a private fact about yourself getting out for everyone to know to look at you differently – she didn’t shudder, just shook her head sharply and let out a small hiss.

 

Nick sighed. “We all are, but, I guess some of us have less privacy to go back to, is all.”

 

She wasn’t thirsty, but got a cup to cover why she’d left the table, and after a few minutes found herself sharing her own opinions on pissing sitting down and doing it standing up. “Okay, on one hand it’s just urination, but there’s something nice about sitting down and relaxing instead of just pissing off.”

 

When she finally left, she was still riding the high of all the conversation and the liberty to not worry about how to make proper eye contact, and couldn’t get to sleep for the longest time. When she got back to the hotel the next morning a good hour before the panels started without any breakfast in her stomach, Nick waylaid her from across the atrium, jogging over to say hello and then snagged a couple of croissants for her.

 

“Do they make these fresh?” She didn’t wait for an answer before tearing into one.

 

“They say they do, but put enough butter on them and you don’t care.” She laughed around the pastry.

 

The panel on media portrayals was pretty good – everyone agreed stomping around wasn’t a substitute for decent body language – but it was the one after that, on dealing with parents, that made her want to contribute to the discussion. She knew she’d shifted late, and had her own life independent of the rest of her family, but she hadn’t considered that if she’d shifted earlier she might’ve had her name changed. Laurel had gone so far as to change hers back from ‘Edwin’ when she’d turned eighteen.

 

“Massachusetts state law’s just like that,” Matt cut in. “Pretty much all of them are, where parents can just come in and change it for you.”

 

“Did they ask you what you wanted?” Aaron asked.

 

“No, but they let me keep it as my middle name – like that’d make it better. I mean, it helped a bit, but still.”

 

Now or never: she stood up, looked around, and opened her mouth. “Hi. Uhm, I’m Allison, this, right, I haven’t changed it and I don’t think I will. I just go by my last name at work, everybody does, but still, it’s a way for me to stay anonymous and not have to come out if I don’t want to.” She sat right back down, face hot, and heard the general consensus and murmured agreement spread out like a wave.

 

When everyone broke for lunch, Gary and Misha invited her out to a little Italian place nearby that had private booths and more than enough people there already to let them talk pretty loudly about navigating dating someone. She couldn’t get over it: the awareness that she could go ahead and say these things without having to stop to think if the other people she was talking to would understand, because of course they did. They didn’t have the same pasts, or the same set of circumstances, but they all knew, just the same. The mussel soup was pretty good, too.

 

At the news Misha had hit six months in his current relationship, she slapped him on the arm the way she’d always slapped her friends in high school, nothing masculine about it at all. “So what’s her name?”

 

“Victoria.”

 

“Is it getting serious?”

 

“She’s talking about me moving in with her.” Gary whistled at that. “Her apartment’s nicer than mine, so I might go for it.”

 

“There’s worse reasons to move in with someone,” Cameron said.

 

“Yeah, I’ve probably used some of them by now.” He smiled and sighed. “She’s great, really, but it’s going to be a bit of a cluster when I tell her.”

 

“You haven’t told her yet?”

 

He shrugged. “After a while, it gets awkward to try. ‘Honey, before we move in together, there’s something I need to discuss.’”

 

“Just sit her down with some breakfast. ‘Have you ever wondered why I don’t care about make-up or cooking? I’m glad you asked…’”

 

By now, there was finally enough distance between then and now for her to laugh over how she’d ended up telling Rita, and plenty of empathy for Gary and Misha to laugh too. When they’d caught their breath, she went ahead and asked, “Have you ever dated men?”

 

“Does fucking in college count?”

 

“Everyone fucks in college. I mean dating.”

 

“A couple.” Gary flicked some crumbs away. “They didn’t really work out.”

 

When Cameron looked at him, Misha just shrugged. She thought about Miles’ hands running down her back, listened to what everyone wasn’t saying, and changed the subject back to the food, which everyone was happy to switch to.

 

After lunch she went to the one on workplace performance and then to the ones on social coping strategies and nonverbal communication patterns, talking more each time. Soon she was throwing comments back and forth from across the room about always going to the bathroom before going out even if she didn’t have to because then she wouldn’t be in such a rush she wouldn’t think to check, and why she made sure to look at all of a person’s body language. And yeah, she had to admit it felt pretty good when everyone started asking her more about how she could tell if people were lying, even if all she could say was, “Practice.”

 

After the evening break – Gavin from the nonverbal communication panel knew about a hidden teriyaki joint just two blocks away which had sauce to die for – everyone reconvened back in the main room for another session of breezy networking, and even though she didn’t push herself forward she didn’t hug the wall either. And again, Nick came over to talk to her, sitting down and starting up another conversation. This time, it cumulated with them exchanging e-mail addresses and the promise to keep in touch; something she repeated a few more times before she finally went back to her apartment, still giddy and worn-out at the same time, and had to go for a run at one in the morning to be able to fall asleep.

 

-

 

She didn’t feel any different – not substantially, not after a fairly regular Sunday of errands and chores – but Farkas shot her a look as soon as she came in on Monday. “Can I help you with something?”

 

“No.” Her expression shifted to a faint smile. “You look good.”

 

“Thank you.” She wanted to say ‘Oh, I happened to meet a movie star this weekend,’ but decided, for a change, it was good to keep something private that was also fun.

 

Three weeks after that, she was out on a ferry eating a very squished sandwich and waiting to get far enough out from land to get to a good spot for whales. Nick had suggested this adventure and was munching on a sandwich of his own, salami on whole wheat to her tuna on pumpernickel.

 

“Pretty big sight,” he mused.

 

She nodded, not sure exactly how to respond to that, or to anything else here for that matter. “I didn’t see an ocean until I was twenty-seven,” she finally said as he flicked crumbs off his lap.

 

“No kidding?”

 

“I grew up in the Midwest. I did my internship in New Jersey, and managed to get out to New York one week, and –” Trying to express the bigness of her first sight of the Atlantic and failing, she waved her hand out towards the water. “Lake Michigan’s big, but it’s not much next to the Atlantic.”

 

“Which isn’t much to the Pacific. You know, two oceans is more than what most people get. You’re really lucky.”

 

She snorted out a laugh. “Yeah, lucky me.”

 

“Yeah. Lucky you.” There was something to his tone that made her look at him, at the firm lines suddenly set into his face, and she knew he didn’t mean it in jest at all.

 

There were whales that day, a whole pod of them, and sea lions and scores of birds, and everyone kept shouting and pointing when a whale came up to breathe and ran to the side of the boat to see it go under. When they got back to land, it was too late for lunch and too early for dinner, which somehow led to Nick suggesting, and Cameron accepting, spending the time hanging around his apartment and ordering take-out later.

 

Like hers, his was a one-bedroom place, but one with more amenities for potential visitors of all types – her prefab dining room set had come with four chairs, but she still didn’t have a couch. There wasn’t much reason to get one when a big easy chair worked just as well. Although she had to admit being able to stretch her legs out flat might make it worth the investment to start shopping for one. It felt so good to sit down after so much standing and rocking on the boat she let out a long, deep groan when she finally laid her feet up.

 

Nick grinned from the doorway. “Anything I can get for you?”

 

“Mmm, I’ll take a pillow, and black in the biggest mug you’ve got, with plenty of honey.” He grabbed a pillow from the easy chair and threw it at her, hitting her right in the face and prompting a round of giggling. “And it’d better be looseleaf!”

 

“Smoky, savory, spiced, sweet?”

 

She arranged the pillow under her neck, rolling her head around to get it just right. “Smoky.” He moved off past her line of sight, she closed her eyes, and the shrill cry of the kettle shocked her out of the doze. A bit more sensibly, Nick had a mug of jasmine green. Pushing herself up into enough of a sitting position to blow on the tea without spilling it, she watched him lower himself into the chair, also with a bit of grunting and a very relieved sigh once he was down, cradling the mug right up against his chest.

 

“Good trip.”

 

“You go on those a lot?”

 

“A few times a year, if I can.” He sighed and leaned back, and then leaned forward. “Can I ask you something personal?”

 

“Sure, I guess.”

 

“When did it happen for you?”

 

As surprising as it was, she didn’t have to think about the answer. “Almost three years ago. Why?”

 

He shrugged. “Just wanted to know.”

 

She swung her legs down to a sitting position. “And you?”

 

Rubbing a hand over his face, “It happened to me when I was fourteen.”

 

“Oh.”

 

“I’m mostly…I was going through puberty already, and I’d started getting breasts – they were okay – and when it happened, it was like the process just shifted.” He tipped his head back, then turned to look at her. “And I’m just, I guess kind of curious.” She nodded for him to go on. “I’ve been talking to people about when they shifted and how it went.” They both knew Cameron was on the far end of the age spectrum for it, and he shook his head and kept talking, “I’d like to do something with what I’m getting, if I could. But I’m –”

 

“You’re curious for yourself,” she shook her head, the pieces fitting in. “You grew up as a girl but didn’t get to mature as a female but you almost got there, and because of that you want to know what being a woman was like. And because I shifted so late, you want to talk to me about that.” As she talked, the words falling out of her mouth like she was describing a fungal infection, he looked more and more upset. Not sad or pained like she might have expected.

 

“Yeah, and so? I like you, I like talking to you. And I want to know that, but so what? I’ll still want to talk to you after you tell me.”

 

“I’m sorry. I’m sorry. I didn’t mean for it to come out like that, I was just thinking out loud, I don’t mind that you want to know. What do you want to know?”

 

Nick blinked, nodded, her apology setting in gradually; she knew she’d have to be honest about what he asked to make it up. He licked his lips. “What was menstruation like?”

 

“It was…it was something to deal with, most of the time. It hurt, and it was messy, but it wasn’t as bad as most movies make it look. I’d take some painkillers and exercise and maybe have a beer, and keep changing my pads. ”

 

“How did it feel to stop?”

 

She took a sip of her tea, now cool enough to drink. “When I realized that I’d had my last, it, I felt like I’d lost a lot of how it was to be female. My mother made sure that me and, that I understood how female a thing menses is. And suddenly I realized it wasn’t something I’d ever do anymore. And it’s not that stopping it made me not a woman – it doesn’t stop everyone who goes through menopause. It’s that…” She stared down at the dust at the bottom of the mug, suspended in the honey, and swirled the cup around to make it move. “I still feel like a woman. Every day. I never feel like a man, even when I’m fucking a woman. Especially when I’m fucking a woman. And I still think of myself as a woman. But I can’t do what women do anymore, and there’s nothing I’ll ever be able to do for another woman to recognize me, and I can’t…”

 

“I always wanted to.” He had the same firm expression he had earlier when he’d said she was lucky. “I knew it’d hurt, but it was something I’d do and then become a woman. When I was eight I knew that’s how it worked: menstruate and you were a woman.”

 

“Being a woman takes years of hard work and social conditioning. You can’t just have it happen with a menses overnight.”

 

“I know.” This time, he sounded more sad than angry. Wistful, even.

 

“And it’s not, it’s not just with women – men know because I don’t do it right, I can’t be a man enough, and no matter what I do for men or women it’s not correct, and I don’t know how to fix it –”

 

“It’s not being correct.” He was still cradling his tea by his chest. “It’s not about being one or the other. I mean, we’re – we can’t be. It’s about pretending, and pretending good enough to fool people.” He smiled, very faintly. “It’s about playing the boy.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“It’s not so much convincing yourself you’re not a girl. It’s about knowing there’s nothing wrong with you, no matter how much you fuck up a conversation because you don’t know how to make eye contact, and being able to play at being the boy.” She looked back down at her tea, then down at the floor, over to Nick’s gentle expression, then slowly felt herself smile. “Do you understand?”

 

She nodded. “I think I do.”

 

-

 

“Doctor Cameron?” She looked up from her computer to look at Paik, the newest department fellow, poking her head in her office. “Could you come here for a minute?”

 

“Sure.” Paik led her on to Tenopir’s office. “What’s the trouble?”

 

“We’ve got a patient, and, Tenopir wants you to talk to her.” She handed Cameron the file, who thumbed it on and scanned through the display down to the relevant charting and end diagnosis.

 

“The treatment’s easy. What do you need me for?”

 

“She’s refusing it.”

 

“Oh. In that case, I’d better go talk to her.”

 

Mary Lippitt’s bed was the only full one in the room right now, and she smiled when Cameron pushed the curtain aside. “Hello.”

 

“Hi there, Mrs. Lippitt. I’m Doctor Cameron from immunology.”

 

“Good to meet you.”

 

She pulled a stool over, rested her arms on her legs. “How’s your stay been so far?”

 

“Not too bad, really.” The way she laughed with her head instead of her face meant she knew just what was going on in her body.

 

“I’m glad to hear that.”

 

Suddenly that much more serious, “Is there something you wanted to talk about?”

 

“I understand you’re refusing treatment.”

 

“Yes.”

 

“Can I ask why?”

 

“From what you’ve told me, it’s just in my uterus and you can leave the ovaries –”

 

“Mrs. Lippit, that’s not what we’re saying.”

 

“Or, or you could leave it and wait, and I could get the surgery later.”

 

“You could, and then put yourself at risk for it metastasizing to another part of your system.”

 

“Yes, but I think I should wait.”

 

“Why?”

 

“My husband and I have been trying to get pregnant for months. We’ve lined up some specialists and they’re ready to go. And if I wait a bit longer, I can finally have a baby.”

 

“All right.” Cameron took a deep breath and spoke slowly. “You’re putting off surgery which will save your life and keep you from a horrible death because you want to get pregnant.” She looked confused, but nodded. “Because you want to have a baby.” A more definite nod. “I assume you’ve thought this through all the way.”

 

“What do you mean?”

 

“Do you know how many babies are born every day here? Or in the state? Or in the country? Having a baby isn’t anything special.”

 

“Doctor, I’m sorry –”

 

“What I’m hearing from you, and please correct me if I’m wrong, is that you and your husband want a baby, and you want to make sure you’re going to use your uterus at least once in your life.”

 

“Why are you saying this?”

 

“Because what you’re telling me is that you want to give birth to a baby, not raise a child.”

 

“Of course I want to raise a child!”

 

“Then why are you so set on birth as your only option? You could adopt, you could have your eggs harvested and hire a surrogate – losing your ovaries and uterus isn’t the end of the world. This isn’t the fifteen hundreds. Having a baby isn’t the only way for a woman to make a contribution to society.”

 

“Why are you telling me this?”

 

“Mrs. Lippitt, if you think I don’t understand –”

 

“Of course you can’t.”

 

“If you think I don’t understand,” she repeated more firmly, shaking on the inside, “I assure you I do. I lost my chance to have children, Mrs. Lippitt, and I knew my life wasn’t over.” She whipped her head around to look at Cameron, who went on as best she could, “I’m an androgyne, and I’d appreciate you keeping that in mind when I say that giving birth shouldn’t be the end-all-be-all to your life.”

 

A half-hour later, she delivered the signed consent form to Tenopir herself. “Here you go.”

 

“Thanks. I mean, this is a lifesaver.”

 

“You’re welcome.”

 

On the way back to her office, she could practically hear House mocking her for replacing ‘my dead husband’ for ‘my lost femininity’ in terms of patient bargaining fodder – to which she argued that if it was a literal lifesaver, and kept someone who’d otherwise be a trophy birth out of the world, it was worth it.

 

-

 

Cameron’s reputation had been building steadily, and Lippitt more or less cemented her position as being on-track for the head of Immunology in a few years thanks to her people skills. She told Nick about it one day while wandering through Pike Place Market looking for a birthday gift for Sam, and he laughed: “When you learn things because you have to, sometimes you know them better than the people who didn’t have to.”

 

“Word to that.”

 

She re-checked the terms of her lease, talked to her landlord, and began looking around for a pet that could live comfortably in a tank, finally settling on a pair of captive-bred turtles. She made a point to dress as nicely as she could, and perhaps the suits and ties were a bit much, but she’d grown comfortable with them, and liked how they made her feel and keep attention to the performance, but when she went out on a day hike with Farkas one weekend, she surprised her colleague by showing up in a short-sleeved t-shirt. She wrote Christmas cards to everyone back home, her old boss and Cuddy, to Foreman and Chase and after some deliberation, Miller got onto the list too, and she chatted with people in the line at the Post Office about stamps rising to twenty-seven cents.

 

When, after nearly five years of work, Cameron finally got her own department, much was made of it: the third Diagnostic Medicine department in the country, one of just a handful in the world. Wilson called her to congratulate her and tell her House was bragging with elaborate virus and karate metaphors. She honestly wouldn’t expect anything less of him.

 

“What do you want on the door?”

 

“Doctor Allison Cameron, department of diagnostic medicine.”

 

Panos pursed her lips. “Your full name?”

 

“Yes.”

 

“All right.”

 

It turned out to be for the best: when her first interviewee for a fellowship came in the door, she did a double-take, clearly trying to reconcile the name on the door with the person behind the desk. And, thanks to Sam, the framed old photograph on her desk.

 

“Is that your daughter?” Sampsel asked.

 

“No, that’s me when I was seventeen.”

 

Only three of the twelve candidates took that their boss was an androgyne in stride; by now, Cameron knew how to tell if people couldn’t, and also to not bother wasting her time on them, much less attempting to teach them how to look for zebras hidden with all the horses.

 

-

 

She scanned down the list of speakers and snorted. Of course there were only three men speaking, not including her. The paper on the ethics of living organ donation looked pretty interesting, and – she snapped back and checked one of the names, and mentally rescheduled her afternoon.

 

He was a good speaker, and since she’d last spoken to him he’d let his accent come back out again. By now she knew how useful it was to have something that could throw everyone else off, and that right now, in this context, painting himself as the exotic Australian went in his favor. Also, he’d evidently decided to give up on patterns, decked out all in black. She remembered the last time, her first all-nighter since med school, and it was still a good look for him.

 

She waited for him by the door and, when he came out, tapped him on the arm to get his attention. “Robert?”

 

“Yes, is…” He did a double-take. “Allison?”

 

“The one and only.”

 

Taking a step back, looking her up and down, “This is – wow, you look good.”

 

“Thanks, you too. I like the tie.”

 

“It’s great to see you. So are you presenting?”

 

“Yeah, tomorrow afternoon, it’ll be on innate responses. Listen,” she pushed through her nervousness and realization they were now the same height, “there’s no way you want to eat the food here, and there’s a great little bistro maybe fifteen minutes away – you want to catch up over lunch?”

 

She’d missed that smile. “I’d love that.”

 

The crepes were delicious, and knowing that she the ability to relax and just be herself around him – it felt like being back in the conference room, down to the bistro’s huge windows – gave her the strength to pull him into staying off-call and going across the street for a cup of coffee. “Coffee?”

 

“Yeah, it’s the new food fad. It’s getting big.”

 

“No, I’ve had coffee before. My dad drank it all the time – it’s not something I’d think would catch on in the States. You like your drinks sweet.”

 

“You’re one to talk. You always finished the honey back in Princeton.”

 

“I never said I didn’t.”

 

Once they got their drinks and sat down in one of the booths, he sighed and pulled out his hairsticks, shaking his head and letting his hair tumble down, scratching his neck.

 

“Do you ever get it cut anymore?”

 

“If it needs a trim, sure.”

 

She ran a hand over her head. “I need a cut. It’s getting pretty scruffy.”

 

“Ah, long hair always looked good on you.”

 

“I know.” She thought of her queue, hidden away in a manila envelope at the bottom of a box of papers on the upper shelf of her bedroom closet. “But it don’t think it’d look good on me now.”

 

“Fair enough. So how have you been?”

 

“All right, all things considered.” Briefly considering telling him she was thinking about finally getting back onto the dating scene, she went for departmental news instead, talking about her fellows and how they were adjusting, and the recent bizarre case that turned out to be chicken pox caught twenty years later than normal.

 

“I wouldn’t have hired mine if they weren’t so self-reliant. That’s the thing nobody gets with Diagnostics – there’s always weird stuff, but it doesn’t happen every day.”

 

“Whole weeks going by with nobody coming in with the Black Death or fetus in fetu.”

 

“Exactly.” He looked at her, sighed, and smiled. “I’m really glad you caught me – it’s nice to catch up like this.”

 

“I’m glad I recognized your name to catch you.”

 

“I would’ve seen you.”

 

“Well, it’s my name on the paper.”

 

“Not that. You look the same.”

 

“No, I don’t.”

 

“Well, yeah, but – you do. I mean, your eyebrows, your chin – your face is the same. You’ve got the same eyes.”

 

“Really? You think so?” He nodded.

 

She pressed her palm to her cheek, against the now-familiar planes, and looked away and smiled.


End file.
